Before MFP as a Columnist for the Stanford Daily

So I was a columnist for the Daily from September 1999 through January 2000.  While technically, I finished this job before starting the Mayfield Fellows Program, the content of the columns speaks a lot of my state of mind during my senior year of college.  Basically, I was confused (not that I'm not now).  My friends were interviewing for I-Banking and Consulting jobs, I was completely sick of doing Mechanical Engineering problem sets and feared that if I didn't cross over to a non-techie job, I would be pigeon holed into jobs I never wanted to do.  At the same time, I had an innate fear of selling out into a job that I really didn't want to do (such as I-Banking or Consulting).  I have included a couple of my columns here that really remind me of where my state of mind was last year.

• It's all about being in the now  This is about always wishing you are doing something else rather than what you are doing now.  It was at a point in the quarter that I was a bit overwhelmed (read: stressed) and didn't really feel like I was enjoying my life.  A nice, cheesy, closing to a fairly decent period on the Daily opinions staff.
• Have I become a corporate whore?  The only column I wrote that got a seriously negative response in the Daily.  Of course, I could discount it because the response was written by an ex-boyfriend of my girlfriend at the time.  Basically, I wrote about my conflicting feelings of what I want to do with my life.
• Blonds have more fun  My first column, about how bleaching your hair changes external perception of you.  Wow, I could fit my decision into a V-I-E framework!
• Living the typical American lifestyle  I compared the consumerism of America to what I found in Germany.

After re-reading a lot of my columns, I am pretty proud of the value system I am trying to create for myself.  What has made me especially happy is that the values we have reinforced through MFP and E145 closely match what I feel anyway.  I highly recommend to everyone to try writing a column in a paper sometime.  It's quite self-enlightening.