On our first day of class, let’s go over a key rule of life at Stanford: To blatantly rip off “The Shawshank Redemption,” no matter how you choose to plan your time here, eventually it all boils down to pressure and time. Specifically, you always have too much of the first, and you never have enough of the second.

I’m not going to lie – I could have picked different key rules to discuss. (Special favorites include “There’s never enough swipes on your meal plan” and “Traveling always takes a couple minutes longer than you initially think.”) But I brought up pressure and time because they are both universal and inescapable, and because they play completely different roles in our lives. Why not discuss the two constants of every student’s journey? Yes, that includes yours.

I suspect you already came to Palo Alto expecting the first. Of course you would! People like to talk (and generally complain) about pressure all the time, myself most certainly included. Pressure gets the headlines. Pressure blatantly manifests itself in our daily lives. From the job search to grades to deadlines to commitments to family to social expectations, pressure is everywhere. But what we often don’t realize is that pressure comes most notably from ourselves: The same ambition that brought us here also propels us to greater things once we pass through the University gates.

Pressure has its benefits, but it also has its massive pitfalls, especially when we refuse to acknowledge our own role in creating the pressures around us. At the end of the day, the world is full of opportunities, challenges and possibilities, and when we talk endlessly about work-life balance and the iron triad of study, social life and sleep (pick two), our prides and lamentations all come down to ambition – specifically, the possibilities that we ourselves choose to honor or ignore. And one of the biggest issues students here face is a refusal to acknowledge our role in choosing these possibilities. Nobody will ever say that we are independent of external pressures and demands, but the balance of free will rests with us – a benefit that we too often ignore.

I see brilliance here every day, but I also see too many people locked into a certain mode of thinking about how they should live their lives at Stanford, unaware that there almost always exists a way out. But you can absolutely change, adapt, react and turn things around. You have that luxury. It often doesn’t seem like it, but we are free to pick what things matter to us, what dreams we choose to pursue and what benchmarks we set for ourselves. That’s not a yoke, it’s a breaking of the chains.

You can repair mistakes, make new friends, seek new opportunities and find new worlds to explore here at Stanford. You have that option, and you have that power. Especially in a flexible place like the world within Campus Drive, where the University – honestly – tries to make life easier for you, you can get out of difficult situations. If the greatest pressures in life really are self-imposed, then they don’t look nearly as imposing.

Time, on the other hand, is something we can neither control nor see – and for that reason it is considerably more terrifying.

We are often taught to view time as an hourglass, an ever-diminishing supply of a resource we can never live without. Stanford’s laid-back campus culture belies a devastating, all-consuming urgency – but for what? Why do we rush about at such a breakneck pace? To be sure, as with pressure, that urgency impels us to impressive feats we wouldn’t otherwise know were possible. But deadlines and impositions will always be there, and there’s no reason why we should completely give in to our natural tendency towards speed. Going faster maximizes the amount of things we can accomplish in our short time here – but if we go too fast, we make the second great and common mistake of Stanford, and that is to lose sight of why we are here in the first place.

The college experience, especially for upperclassmen, seems tinged with desperation. Many times, students are so caught up in checking all the invisible boxes of the Stanford experience that they often forget why these boxes exist in the first place. But if we succumb to desperation here, where the deck is stacked in our favor, what will we do when we actually have full-time jobs and responsibilities? College gives us the opportunity to slow down, see what we truly hate or enjoy, and be both informed and deliberate when we make some of the biggest decisions of our lives. At 20, the path we set here will go a long way towards guiding our next 20 years. From that perspective, the years we spend here are more important than we normally care to admit.

What can we do to make sure we use our time wisely? An hourglass is an ever-present reminder of diminishing time, a kind of pressure in and of itself. But the same lesson of pressure applies to time as well. We don’t have to view time as an hourglass – we can view it as a road, and one that we can tackle at our own pace. Time is finite, to be sure, but we have a greater say in its progression than we like to admit; we can’t control time, but we can control how we react to it. The only person determining how you spend your time here is yourself – and having said that, here’s to a great year.

Contact Winston Shi at wshi94 ‘at’ Stanford.edu.