Stanford Today
Edition: May/June, 1997
Section: Features: Class of 2000
WWW: Class of 2000

Class of 2000
Fifth in a Series

Keeping Tabs on Five Freshmen from the Last Class of the Millennium

By Marisa Cigarroa

Josia Rivers Lamberto-Egan has style. He sports a long mane of shiny black hair that he likes to pull back in a ponytail. On days when the California sun is burning strong, he often can be seen swaggering across campus in a T-shirt and vintage blue jeans that widen at the hem. Preppy he is not.

In his college application, Lamberto-Egan was asked to write a brief letter to his future roommate relating an experience that revealed something about

himself. The Choate Rosemary Hall graduate chose to describe the day he went from being a clean-shaven lad to being a muttonchop-whiskered dude.

"One morning," the 17-year-old wrote, "still groggy from the infamous four-day battle of 'term paper due date,' I awoke to the honeyed voice of the stubble on my chin, enticing, tempting, seductive. 'Shape me,' it crooned, 'for I can be beautiful.' My resistance to its charms lowered from lack of sleep, I drew my blade and foam, not to kill, but to carve, to craft, to reveal, like Michelangelo, the art hidden within my coarse medium.

"All too soon," he continued, "I finished, and, with a splash of water, unveiled the evil spirit which now controlled my face. Muttonchops. Like maddened ebony fire they licked down my jawline, wrapping into clawlike extensions which scratched their way to the corners of my lips. I was a man consumed. . . . I was reborn. I began to carry out my daily activities with a boldness that I had never known . . . for I am one with the chops . . . and nobody has called me a lad for a long time now."

Lamberto-Egan's transformation from a typical East Coast prep school student to an ultra-funky guy who loves to explore areas beyond the mainstream continued after high school, when he took a year off to travel and work before entering Stanford. "In a sense, the whole year was a departure from anything I had done before," he says of the experience that shifted his interests from science and math to the humanities and social sciences. "I ended up wanting to look more into topics that involve people, languages and cultures."

Two years after they made their first appearance, the chops and Lamberto-Egan are still one. But after six months of living in a relatively insular environment, he's afraid he might be losing some of his edge, which he says derives in large part from remaining connected to the world outside of campus.

"I feel myself starting to get adjusted to life here and falling into a very similar routine to what other people in my dorm are doing - becoming very focused on academics and not much else," he laments. "That kind of frustrates me, but I recognize I can only do so much. If I'm taking five classes and trying to keep up with them, that doesn't leave me with a ton of extra time to do things off campus."

By now, two-thirds of the school year is almost over and most freshmen have become deeply immersed in their day-to-day life at Stanford. They aren't looking back and reminiscing about high school as frequently as they did last fall. They also haven't put much thought into what they will do during the summer. For Lamberto-Egan, Ameen Khalil Saafir, David Lee, Milena Flores, Christina McCarroll and the rest of the Class of 2000, finals are fast approaching; wrapping up winter quarter is what's on their minds.

Two weeks before exams, Lamberto-Egan can feel the stress level rising in his dorm. "A lot of people are taking tough classes like physics and chemistry," says the Serra Hall resident, who tends to blow off his homework a week at a time before hunkering down for an intensive study-fest that lasts two or three days.

Lamberto-Egan managed to talk his way out of CIV and Writing and Critical Thinking, two classes required of all freshmen. Instead, he will take them during his sophomore year. As a result, he has been able to take more electives than the average freshman. His course list includes Spanish, Latin American studies, linguistics, jazz and Afro-Caribbean dance. The class he finds most compelling is his linguistics class, which traces how different languages evolve through the process of cultural assimilation.

Although he likes the class, Lamberto-Egan doesn't plan to pursue linguistics. "The aspects of linguistics that are related to culture are what seem to spark my interest. I'd say the same goes for my Latin American studies class and even my Spanish class. What we do in Spanish that's culturally related seems to me more useful than just learning subjunctive verbs."

AMEEN KHALIL SAAFIR is honing his time-management skills. He double-booked a half-hour to talk with a reporter and clean up his room. Learning how to jam in all the things that a college student has to do on a given day once seemed an insurmountable task for Saafir. But after his experience last quarter, he has learned to juggle his classroom and extracurricular activities more effectively.

"Everything has just fallen into place and things are a lot better this quarter," Saafir says as he shoves a pair of sneakers out of sight. "I feel good about my grades and I feel a lot more comfortable here in general. I guess I just had to get through that initial period of adjustment."

That's not to say that he hasn't had any setbacks this quarter. Saafir came down with the flu in late January. He missed classes for a week before he finally was able to sit through a computer science lecture. He had a hard time catching up with his classmates and, two weeks later, decided to drop the course.

"I realized that I couldn't handle all the units I was taking this quarter, with ROTC and all," he says, "so I thought really hard about whether computer science was what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life. I don't think it is. Now, I'm leaning more toward mechanical engineering. Building stuff sounds pretty cool."

By easing his course load, Saafir feels like he's regained control. "I think I've finally found the right balance between work and having fun."

DAVID LEE stops in the middle of a sentence to yawn. "I feel kind of delirious," says Lee, who is recovering from an all-nighter.

The prospective engineering major says he usually can predict when he's not going to get much sleep. The previous night, he was planning to catch some serious z's because by early afternoon he already had completed a five-page essay due the next day. His only other commitment was to work at the engineering library for two hours in the evening. After that, he was home free.

But things didn't go according to plan. First, Lee lost the computer disk that contained his essay. Luckily, there wasn't much work to be done at the engineering library, so he was able to use the free time to write it all over again. To his dismay, when he returned to his dorm later that evening and inserted the disk into the computer, he couldn't retrieve the essay. "It was midnight by then and I had to start re-doing the assignment for a third time," Lee recalls, shaking his head in frustration.

When he finally completed the assignment and printed it out, he noticed that his roommate had come down with a serious case of the homesick blues. "We just talked and talked and talked until he finally felt better," says Lee, who managed to get one hour of shut-eye before heading out for his morning classes.

MILENA FLORES is struggling to focus on her upcoming finals. The varsity basketball player is revved up for playing in the women's basketball NCAA Tournament, Round One of which is to begin for her team at Maples Pavilion two days before her first exam.

"There are so many things coming at me at one time," says Flores, who has played in every game so far this season. "Sometimes it's kind of hard for me to concentrate on my schoolwork when there's this other huge part of my life that's also going on."

It will take winning six games to earn the NCAA championship. If the Cardinal women lose a game, they fail to advance in the tournament. "Each game will get progressively more difficult as the teams get better," the freshman says.

Although practice has become more intense as the tournament nears, the practices themselves have been shortened to avoid burnout and reduce the risk of injury. Flores has used this extra time to prepare for her exams.

"I have a lot of catch-up reading to do for CIV and a lot of practicing to do for Spanish," she says. Thankfully one class is out of the way, she sighs. Last week, Flores turned in her final paper for her writing class, which doesn't have an exam.

As a freshman, Flores says she doesn't feel the same pressure as the seniors. But she wants to win as much as anybody on the team. "One mistake, one bad game, could knock us out, so we all have to be mentally ready for each game," she says.

CHRISTINA MCCARROLL looks like she's already on spring break. She is wearing loose-fitting overalls and a short-sleeved T-shirt. And every so often during the course of conversation, she pauses to comment on how beautiful the weather is. Her sunny disposition makes it easy to forget that she is a college freshman preparing for finals.

McCarroll's enthusiasm for academic life at Stanford is evident when she talks about her classes this quarter. She particularly enjoys her psychology class, where she observes children at a nursery school on campus. The class has been "so wonderful" that she hopes she can work at the school as a teaching assistant this summer. "I think I've enjoyed being around the children in part because of the excitement with which they pursue and describe their lives," she says. "To be with them is very exhilarating."

Her freshman writing class is another source of inspiration. "A lot of the reading in our writing class has been aimed at making us re-examine our habits of thinking, so I've become more aware of my own foundations of thought," says McCarroll, who plans to take a fiction writing class next quarter.

Chemistry, however, is another matter. "The midterms have been difficult, but I guess it's just a matter of studying more for the final," she says.

While McCarroll has ruled out chemistry as a possible major, it is likely that she will continue to take the class next quarter. "I'm taking chemistry now to keep the possibility of medical school open," she says.

LAMBERTO-EGAN has just earned $7 as a subject in a psychological test. He and another paid volunteer were given 60 seconds to interview each other. After their time was up, they had to answer surveys about how well they thought they knew each other. "It was mildly interesting," Lamberto-Egan says wryly. "But I came out with money in my pocket, so I won't complain."

Participating in psychological studies is one way he is able to pay for dance club cover charges, an occasional dance lesson and gasoline for his motorcycle. He also tutors high school students in physics and math a couple of times a week. "I'm not putting much away for retirement," he jokes. But every bit of cash helps when you're a student.

Lamberto-Egan misses the independence that comes from full-time employment. He spent part of his year off before college working with his father in the merchant marine. He also waited tables at a restaurant in his hometown of Manteo, North Carolina, and taught pre-calculus and algebra to high school students for six weeks last summer. Most of the money he made during this time has helped pay for his first year at Stanford. "I hope I can pay my way through college by working," he says.

Once a week, Lamberto-Egan tutors a Palo Alto high school junior who needs help with his honors pre-calculus class. They huddle around a card table in the middle of the student's living room and quickly get to work, filling up sheets of paper with mathematical equations and graphs.

"My approach to tutoring is to avoid, as best I can, the methodology utilized by the texts my students are using," says Lamberto-Egan, who barely looks at the student's textbook during the hour-long session. "If I can impart the understanding of a concept from a different angle than the book does, then I'm doing a good job."

Sometimes, he grins, this approach can get really interesting, particularly when the subject he is tutoring is conceptual physics. "I find myself, more often than not, bounding in low-gravity orbit around the dinner table carrying chairs as satellites and hurling salt-shaker projectiles around the room. It's good clean fun."

On a sunny day after class, Lamberto-Egan relaxes on a stretch of grass near the edge of Lake Lagunita. Eating an orange, he revels in California's natural glory: "This is the view that made up my mind to come here. It's paradise." The warm weather of the past few weeks, he says, makes it hard to believe that summer is still months away. "It's strange," he says, "I haven't thought much about next quarter, but I know I have to because there's still another third of the school year left."

For now, choosing classes for spring quarter is about as far as Lamberto-Egan will go in plotting his academic future.

"A lot of people that I've met have come here with a real clear picture of where they're headed and it strikes me that they're sacrificing other parts of their life with that in mind. These are freshmen, not juniors and seniors, and that kind of disturbs me.

"I know we are all very responsible, and that's why we are here. But to me, this is the best time to explore new things. This might be a little nearsighted and hedonistic, but it's something that we might not have the luxury to do later in life." ST