Like most students, I missed home cooking and was excited to go back. Unlike most students, however, weird things started happening.
When I first entered my home, I was expecting to be given a key to my room (one that does not actually work. True story, thanks to R&DE), a student ID with meal plan dollars and a plethora of glow-in-the-dark condoms, just in case.
Instead, I was led to my room, forced to carry my own bags and told that I would be asked to come down for lunch in a few minutes. To be quite honest, this was a surprise, but a welcomed one nonetheless. I got a one-room single without even using any of my tiers or pre-assigning — an absolute win in my mind.
That absolute win quickly turned awkward really, though.
Lunch time came and I went down stairs, expecting to swipe my ID that I was never given. Using my intellectual vitality, I remembered how I could easily sneak into the dining halls on campus, so I treated this scenario the same.
After lunch, I went upstairs to rest but soon realized that I had locked myself out. Not having a GroupMe with my parents in it, I panicked. Should I try to break in? Should I email them? I tried going to the front desk but there wasn’t one. After a few minutes of hardcore brainstorming, I decided that the fastest way would be for me to approach them in person — a skill for which neither CS 106B nor MATH 51 equipped me.
After having that awkward conversation, I was lectured by my dad about how incompetent I was that I did not know how to turn the door knob (another skill I was not taught in any of my classes). I responded that I might not know how to turn a door knob or change a lightbulb, but I sure do know how to disappoint my family, drop out and found my own start-up.
This snippet serves as one of the many examples of how Stanford has changed my daily life. While I was home, I even found myself flaking on my high school friends after telling them, “let’s grab lunch sometime.”
With that in mind, I can’t wait till I get back to campus where everything makes sense.
I rated my experience as a six out of 10 on Trivago — should’ve pre-assigned to a self-op instead.
Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.
Contact Ruslan Al-Jabari at rjabari ‘at’ stanford.edu.