1/2/2024 0 Comments Stanford band mocks iowa“I just thought I wasn’t smart enough to be here.” College is where we learn that W(ithdrew) is actually a viable option to an F. “Even though I was working my ass off,” he says. Robbins got the first C of his life as a college freshman. She graduates June 14 with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity.Ĭollege is where many of us discover we are not as smart as we always thought we were. “I make boys take me on dates,” says Ginille Lazaro, a part-time model and the resident assistant at Yost House, a residence hall on the western edge of campus. In some Stanford dorms, even the mediocre cafeteria food is cut off on Fridays and Saturdays, requiring creative survival strategies. In college - the subject of this fifth installment in the Mercury News’ 12-part series, “Life in a Year” - for the first time in our lives we go from home cooking to no cooking. Confined to a dorm room that would make Solzhenitsyn weep for the gulag, teenagers living away from home for the first time will find a way to turn that solitary confinement into a sexual exploratorium. Even if Stanford administrators think of it as an institution of much higher learning, when you’re a college student it doesn’t matter where you are: All you’ve got is four years to figure out who you are and - ready or not - who you’re going to be.Ĭollege is where we go to sort it all out, to find the careers that we want, the friends that we’ll keep, and to indulge the uncontrollable urges that we never knew we had. “When they welcome you to freshman orientation,” Robbins says, “part of what they tell you is that you’re better than other people.”Īnd yet, for all the things that make undergraduate life at a place like Stanford seem rarefied, it also feels a lot like college on any other campus in America. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to jam with the cool kids at Stanford, but it doesn’t hurt. in physics, the drummer is a doctoral candidate in biochemistry and the tenor-sax player is pre-med. And though it is open to anyone, on this night the trumpeter is a budding atmosphere and energy engineer, the piano player is working on a Ph.D. The jam session is inside the student union - the heart of every campus. Robbins stands on the bandstand like a reveille bugler, but the melody of Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” floats softly from his trumpet, reverberating through an orchard of glowing Apples. The campus coffeehouse is overlit for jazz, but not for studying, and no one at Stanford’s CoHo seems to even notice as Amrit Robbins begins to blow ripe, pealing notes from his horn.
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