Stanford Today
Edition: January/February, 1997
Section: Features: Class of 2000
WWW: Class of 2000

THIRD IN A SERIES

Keeping Tabs on the Last Class of the Millennium

BY MARISA CIGARROA

"Today is going to be hectic," says David Lee, as he makes his daily trek to the Physics Tank, where he will spend the next two hours of the morning in classes.

In addition to his regular Monday schedule of physics at 10 a.m., followed by calculus at 11 a.m. and Cultures, Ideas and Values (CIV) at 1:15 p.m., Lee will have lunch with his academic advisers at noon, attend an optional piano class at 12:30 p.m., practice with the Stanford crew team in Redwood City from 3 to 5:30 p.m., grab a quick bite to eat back at the dorm, talk with a reporter from 6 to 7:30 p.m., work at the engineering library from 8 to 10 p.m., then start writing a six-page paper for CIV, due on Wednesday.

"I wanted to begin working on the essay last night, but people in the hallway were getting loud so I decided to go to sleep and save my energy to work on it today," says Lee, who hopes to finish the paper by Tuesday afternoon, before another round of partying in the dorm begins to celebrate the beginning of Thanksgiving break.

Welcome to freshman year. Learning to balance academics with extracurricular activities and socializing is one of the biggest challenges that all freshmen face. Some freshmen use their first quarter as a time to test their limits. They take tough courses, sign up for an extracurricular activity or two and party as much as possible given their jammed agendas. Others consciously avoid spreading themselves too thin. And still other students - such as varsity athletes - have most of the hours in their days pretty much accounted for before they even set foot on campus.

For Lee, Ameen Khalil Saafir, Milena Flores, Josia Lamberto-Egan and Christina McCarroll, their diverse interests already have begun to take them on separate paths. But as the first quarter of their freshman year comes to a close, they each share at least one common experience: When they reflect on their time at Stanford, all are awed by how much ground they have covered in just 10 weeks.

When Lee meets his advisers for lunch, he doesn't have much to say. Asked how classes are going, he replies "OK." When prodded for more information, he finally provides them with a few telling details, like what kinds of grades he received in his midterms and what his first race as a member of the crew team was like.

"I'm not sure they would be able to advise me, even if things were going badly, because I already know what it is that I have to do," says Lee, who is determined to do whatever it takes to complete the basic requirements for engineering majors during his first two years of college.

The only shock so far came after a physics exam. "I studied the whole weekend for it. I even took last year's midterm and it was so easy that I finished it in 15 minutes. But the real test was so much harder. I finished it in 50 minutes and it felt like it took longer than that," he recalls. When the exam was over, however, he felt like he had done pretty well.

Then he got his grade - a 75. "I thought, 'Oh my God, I got a C. I don't believe this.' I called my sister [a fifth-year student at UC-Berkeley] and she told me that the first thing she learned in college is that everything is relative. It doesn't matter how well or how bad you do, just how you are doing compared to other people in the class."

As it turns out, the test was graded on a curve and Lee wound up with an A. In fact, he's doing fine in all of his classes. He received an A and a B in his physics midterms, an A in his first calculus midterm (he's still waiting to get the second one back) and a B in his CIV midterm. But he's not satisfied with these grades, so he stays up studying until four or five in the morning, two or three times a week - minimum.

"For me, it's OK not to do well sometimes," he says. "But coming from an Asian family, I always have the parent factor over my head and I hear myself saying 'Wait, I'm getting a B right now. That's not good. I need an A.' "

It's 2 in the afternoon and Ameen Khalil Saafir has just awakened from a nap. He's finished with classes for the day and he is resting before tackling his homework for the week.

"I am just starting to get the hang of what I have to do in order to survive," says a bleary-eyed Saafir. "In high school, things came easy to me. I was used to being the one who set the curve. Now, I'm pretty much in the middle. That was a big adjustment at first. We all kind of talked about it in the dorm after we got back our first midterms and most people felt the same way."

Grades aside, he is enjoying his classes. Saafir had no experience writing computer programs before coming to Stanford. But in the short time he has been here, he has learned how to write flight reservation programs, create computerized slot machines and design adventure games. "The work for computer science takes up to about three hours a day, but I really enjoy this kind of thing," he says. "It's a completely new area for me."

Saafir looks forward to attending his CIV discussion sections. One of the more memorable discussions he recalls from that class was based on readings from the Bible. "A student in the class took the position of devil's advocate. Basically, he was saying Jesus could have been a politician, with a really good grassroots campaign, who knew how to talk to people so what he said caught on, even though it might not be true at all. That's probably not what happened," says Saafir, who considers himself a non-denominational Christian, "but some people in class took [what the student said] to heart and it made for a very powerful discussion."

When he's not in class or at Navy ROTC training or doing homework, Saafir is probably hanging out with friends in his dorm or organizing a party: He is Cedro Hall's official social chair. "I feel a lot closer to people here than people that I've known back home for years, just because I see them constantly," he says. "I'm comfortable telling them just about anything."

After years of wanting to attend Stanford and play on its top-ranked women's basketball team, Milena Flores is finally finding out what it's like to play competitive ball while taking college-level courses.

Last week, the freshman point guard played for about five minutes during the season opener against No. 2-ranked Alabama. Stanford won 74-65 in the game, which took place in Maples Pavilion.

"Not everybody gets to play in every game, so just getting on the court in such a big game was a pretty amazing feeling," Flores says. She sank a 3-pointer on her first scoring attempt. "It felt good because I had just really screwed up on offense. I made a bad pass. Luckily, the ball was out of bounds, we got it back and I scored, so that kind of made up for the mistake that had just occurred."

Flores was preparing to leave for Hawaii for a three-day tournament during Thanksgiving break. "I'll be experiencing what it's like to go to school and be traveling at the same time that I am trying to get homework done," says Flores, who seems unruffled by her busy schedule. When she comes back to campus, Dead Week - the period of time given to undergraduates to prepare for finals - will have begun.

So far, Flores says the work required in her classes has been manageable. She had two midterms in Spanish and has turned in weekly, one-page essays and a longer six-page analytical paper for CIV. "I'm still waiting to see how I did on the longer paper, which counts for a big chunk of our grade," Flores says.

Her most difficult class is an introduction to computer science, which has turned out to be more demanding than she anticipated. As part of her grade, Flores is required to write weekly computer programs.

"I've had to put extra time into this class because computer science is not really my line of expertise," she says. In hindsight, Flores doesn't regret having signed up for the class.

"I guess this a good experience for me to have in the long run," she says.

When it came time to sign up for classes at the beginning of fall quarter, Josia Lamberto-Egan decided he wanted to take an easier course load. That way, he figured, he'd have more time to explore new areas of interest, such as dance, before settling on a major that could very well end up consuming most of his time at Stanford. Besides CIV, which is a required class for first-year students, he chose Spanish for advanced speakers and Latin dance, which he ended up dropping in favor of a class called "Modernism and the Humanities."

Lamberto-Egan is one of only two freshmen in the literature-based class, which consists of about 20 upperclassmen and a few graduate students. "The discussions in that class have been great," he says, enthusiastically. "The first week I was there, people were making references to artists and writers I had never even heard of. It was the first time in a long time that I didn't know if I was going to be able to handle something."

Although he dropped Latin dance, Lamberto-Egan has been able to pursue his interest in baile by participating in Grupo Folklorico, a dance troupe of about 20 students that performs dances from various parts of Latin America.

On a rainy night in late November, the members of the group parade into Roble Gym dressed in full costume. They are rehearsing for an upcoming recital in San Francisco and the dance teacher wants to make sure that they are dressed appropriately. Lamberto-Egan is wearing a baggy, long-sleeved cotton shirt and matching knickers, gathered at the waist by a thick red sash. He's also wielding a fake machete, a prop used in one of the dances.

"This has been a good way for me to meet a lot of people," says the first-year student, who worked and traveled for a year before coming to Stanford. "Most of the guys in Grupo are graduate students, which I think is great. I figured there was going to be this clear division between the graduate and undergraduate populations, but that hasn't been the case," he is happy to report.

Lamberto-Egan spends most of his free time with his girlfriend, who graduated from high school last year and has chosen to take some time off before applying to college. The two frequent local dance clubs as often as two or three times a week.

"Maria and I operate as an independent unit, which is nice because I don't feel so tied down to the dorm," Lamberto-Egan says. "Reaching outside the boundaries of campus for stuff to do provides a good perspective because it helps break down the image of college as an ivory tower."

Though he loves to explore the Bay Area scene, Lamberto-Egan makes it a point to participate in campus activities from time to time. Later this evening, for example, he and his girlfriend will teach people in his dorm how to merengue.

"We'll show them a couple of turns, play some music and do a couple of moves, then see where it goes from there," he says, breaking into an easy smile.

Christina McCarroll never ceases to be amazed at the breakneck speed of college classes. "In high school, we would take a whole year to get through a textbook and sometimes we wouldn't even finish it," she says. A couple of weeks into the first quarter of her chemistry class, McCarroll was already taking a midterm. "It's nice to think how much we can pack in there," she says. "But you really have to keep up."

When she first arrived on campus, McCarroll was "kind of overwhelmed" by the sheer volume of reading she had to do and the constant stream of problem sets she had to turn in. But once midterms and deadlines for papers started to kick in, she got used to the heavy workload.

Taking large lecture classes hasn't been as difficult to adjust to as she had imagined. "I thought that it would be a bigger deal for me than it was," says McCarroll, who considered going to a smaller school to take advantage of more intimate class settings. "Both chemistry and CIV have sections that are small, so that makes them more manageable," she says.

McCarroll's favorite class is psychology. "We learned some stuff that was really interesting, like how babies acquire language," she says. Because the class is taught by a variety of guest lecturers from the psychology department, she has been exposed to a number of interesting professors whose classes she'd like to sample in the future.

She is even entertaining thoughts of becoming a research assistant to a professor in the psychology department in the spring.

During the course of conversation, it dawns on McCarroll that many of the events of recent weeks have blended together.

"It's hard to remember details when you are so focused on each day, on the classes that you are taking and the people you see," she says.

An avid writer in high school, she keeps meaning to record her college memories in a journal, but she hasn't made any progress on it to date. "Some thing's are just so easy to keep putting off," she concedes. "But I do think that it would be a good thing to do."

Lee is sitting at his desk, talking in between bites of a chicken and rice dinner that he brought back to his room from the dining hall. He's just back from crew practice and, although he's tired, sleep isn't on his schedule for another eight or nine hours.

"In high school everything was so slow," Lee says. "We would wait for the next assignment, for the next test, for the next year. But now, it's zoom, zoom, zoom. Everything is flying by so fast," he says.

"There are always parties to go, but I try not to go too often," he says in a confessional tone. "I'm afraid I might be having too much fun."

On Halloween, Lee dressed up as a woman. He went to a fraternity party, then joined a multitude of students who congregated around the Stanford Family mausoleum for an annual Halloween dance. The Friday night before the Big Game against Cal, Lee almost dyed his hair Cardinal red. He rode his bicycle to Safeway at midnight to buy hydrogen peroxide and hair coloring. But by the time he returned to his room, it was 2:30 a.m., leaving him only three hours to rest before crew practice, so he chose sleep over school spirit.

"I'm bummed I didn't do it," says Lee. "I really wanted my hair to be red [for the game]." On second thought, he's quick to add, his parents "wouldn't have been happy about it." Indeed, he continues, they might not be too thrilled to learn that he's on the freshman crew team. "They'll think it is taking too much of my time," he laments.

But for Lee, a pianist who has never formally participated in a sport prior to coming to Stanford, rowing has become another important part of his life.

"I'm having fun" he says. "When we are on the water, working as a team, it's so different from solo
piano. It's interesting being part of a group." ST