“When you’re a young adult, your own voice needs to be the strongest one you hear. It is your college experience to own, to have agency over — you need to be the author of it,” said Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising Julie Lythcott-Haims ’89, known affectionately as Dean Julie, who will speak at Stanford’s inaugural TEDx event this Saturday.

 

The charismatic Lythcott-Haims is taking her own advice — listening to her own voice — as she leaves Stanford at the end of this quarter to embark on a new career: writing. In fact, she plans to use her TEDx talk to “try out ideas with the audience” for a book she hopes to write about the role of parents in the lives of college students and young adults.

 

“The over-involvement of parents,” she said, “is leading to the under-construction of young adults” who followed a “checklisted childhood” of demanding expectations devised by parents, schools and society. Lythcott-Haims wants to help parents understand that “their job as parents is to put themselves out of a job,” to step back enough that they don’t get in the way of their child’s creativity and self-discovery. She also has a message for young people: The way to lead an authentic life is to know yourself and have the courage to be true to yourself. Everyone, she said, needs the process of self-discovery, to learn to focus on what is meaningful and to follow through.

 

Lythcott-Haims underwent a similar process: After earning her undergraduate degree in 1989 from Stanford and then a law degree at Harvard, she began practicing law in Silicon Valley. It was lucrative and prestigious, she recalled, but after four years, “I was miserable. It was difficult to turn away and say I’m choosing something different.” But she did, joining the administration at Stanford.

 

Now she is embarking on a new challenge:  earning a master’s of fine arts and pursuing writing, in particular poetry, at a master of fine arts program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. When she was a freshman, her professors said her writing needed a lot of work — “and they were right,” she said — so she set about improving it. “The things we fear feel like a big wave we’re running away from, and I had to turn around and face the wave,” she said.

 

In 2007, she read a poetry collection by Lucille Clifton called “Good Woman.” Never before a poetry fan, she was mesmerized, recognizing a voice that resonated with her own. She began writing her own song lyrics. Now her poetry touches on identity issues, relationships and political commentary.

 

“When you get to be my age, you appreciate more and more that life is short, and if there’s a voice telling you there’s something out there you want to do, you have to listen,” Lythcott-Haims said. But she won’t lose sight of her time at Stanford — “it has been a great laboratory and observatory” — and wants to use what she has learned here to make a difference elsewhere. She leaves an incredible legacy at Stanford, especially with the Reflections program she created for future classes. The biggest lesson? “Things are going to go wrong, but you’ll be okay,” she said. “You’ll learn from it — that is what life is about.”