I spent much of last week entrenched in party-planning mode, frantically preparing for my slightly belated housewarming. It was quite the success, and if I sound a little smug about it, it’s because I am.

The planning process involved the kind of stubborn persistence that only my favorite things, parties and making lists, can inspire. I threw myself into this task with a fervor that surprised even me, eventually resorting to using spreadsheets to organize my RSVP-tracking system and tiered to-do lists.

The day of the party was devoted solely to preparation, which included a marathon afternoon of making hors d’oeuvres and an evening of artfully arranging the living room and mopping.

As my fellow hostesses and I swept and sliced summer squash, I wondered if it is normal to prepare for a housewarming with such intensity. What drove me to the state of party planning where I actually made a flowchart of the ideal tempo and mood of my meticulously timed playlist? Is this normal? If not, is it at least acceptably close to normal?

While I cannot attribute all of the insanity to the Stanford effect, upon reflection, I certainly think I drew heavily from the past four years. As an undergraduate who was lucky enough to spend three years on the Row, I relished the sense of community and pride generated from my place of residence, perhaps to a degree that I am ashamed to say occasionally bordered on belligerence.

Even as a freshman, though I scoffed at the incessant dorm chanting asked of me during the entire first month of school, I had somewhere to expend this energy. Now, with no repetitive chants and a lack of bi-weekly social gatherings through which to funnel my instinctive and fierce pride, I apparently become a manic version of myself when preparing my home for company. The competitive streak I try so hard to hide rears its less-than-pleasant face in the unnecessary perfectionism that causes me to rethink and overanalyze both the appearance and gastronomical cues of garnishes on dips.

It seems, somewhat unexpectedly, that this part of my Stanford experience has followed me faithfully, and though I would hesitate to say I am ready to create and start shrieking a chant about my apartment, I do invest a great deal of my identity in my domicile. This is an instinctive feeling for me, coming to the surface much more readily than my supposed bachelor-level expertise on science.

I don’t think that community and pride and ownership are exclusive to the Stanford experience, but I do think that I learned them on campus. (I never did seriously consider the aesthetics of the bookshelves in my parents’ house while I was in high school, and I certainly never mopped anything three times in one day.) For many of us, Stanford is where we do a lot of our growing up, a large part of which, for me, is asserting my independence and identity through engaging with my home, one of the first things over which my parents had little to no control.

This might manifest itself in the questionable choices we all make in covering every inch of white walls in our first dorm rooms with posters, photographs, ticket stubs, a loud announcement to the world, “This is what I like! This is who I am!” I devoted my life to running my house’s kitchen one year, a labor of love born of my giddy independence.

This is not to say that my throwing of one successful housewarming marks a smooth and clean-cut transition into adulthood. In fact, I would venture a thought that a real adult might merely smile indulgently upon witnessing the obsessive process I took to get there, thinking about the next stage of growing up that has yet to make its way into my conscious mind. Ultimately, I am relieved that the love of home that I found at Stanford is something that is so easily transferrable—and that I have managed to convince myself that throwing parties is just a part of growing up that I should indulge in as much as possible.

Want to be on the guest list for the next event? E-mail Jade at [email protected].