Each year, the student organization Stanford Spokes aims to overcome polarization and educational inequities by putting wheels on the ground – two bike wheels, to be exact.
Every summer since 2017, a cohort of six to seven Stanford students has biked over 2,500 miles for 70 days along farm and service roads from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. This year’s seven-member team will leave in mid-June and is planning to arrive in D.C. by the end of August. During the program, which is sponsored by Stanford Digital Education and buoyed by student donations, the Spokes team teaches children at summer camps, Boys & Girls Clubs and this year, for the first time, a juvenile detention center.
With one alternating team member driving the van that follows them for support, the Spokes team bikes around 80 miles a day on the days they aren’t teaching.
Will Yu ’27, a member of the 2024 team, said the group biked from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. every day, taking frequent breaks to refuel and rehydrate. They spent most nights on a welcoming stranger’s floor through an app called WarmShowers that pairs hosts and cyclists. The group also slept in Airbnbs or hotels.
Many Stanford students would likely describe their ideal summer as one spent advancing their careers. Spokes participants and alumni choose instead to take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to understand and help people across the country. The program aims to expose students to Americans’ diverse lived experiences beyond what a college campus can offer.
Before beginning his freshman year, Yu knew he wanted to participate in the program. From the moment he saw a post about it on the Approaching Stanford account, he was hooked. “I remember being so annoying about it, always emailing, DMing the Stanford Spokes account,” he said.
Spokes lived up to his expectations and then some: “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Yu said.
Having grown up in San Francisco, Yu admitted that before the trip, he held “a lot of stereotypes that I think a lot of people believe” about rural Americans as “white, conservative farmers.” Now, Yu said the trip shattered this preconception and showed him “there is so much kindness in the world.”
Most of Yu’s anecdotes about his Spokes experience had nothing to do with cycling, but with the people he met in rural America: the families who hosted him for dinner, the cast of a small-town Utah production of “Fiddler on the Roof” or the children he taught.
After the 2024 cohort taught students about rockets at a Boys & Girls Club in Huntington, W. Va., Yu remembers a girl who asked him if she could take home an extra rocket-launching set. He said that the group didn’t have extra rockets, but the materials to make her own kit were cheap and easy to find. She answered that her mother worked three jobs and could not spare any extra money.
The group decided to give the girl a smaller version of the kit to take home.
“The biggest takeaway from Spokes is that people have such different perspectives, and it’s allowed me to be more empathetic,” Yu said.
Yu added that he and his Spokes team are “bonded for life” after more than two months sleeping on the same floor, whether in a stranger’s guest bedroom or a high school library in Utah. He stressed the role of teamwork and the responsibility each member had to one another. After the trip, Yu remembers traveling to New York and riding the subway, only to realize he “hadn’t done something alone for 70 days.”
When Matthew Sullivan ’28 learned about Spokes, the program immediately stood out to him. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is really cool,’” he said. “I called my mom and told her: ‘I know what I want to do this summer.’”
His reasons were straightforward. “There are a lot of people who are very narrow-minded with what they want to explore,” he said. “While I still can, I want to explore different avenues, and for me, that means exploring the country this summer.”
This year’s application emphasized teamwork, which Sullivan compared to a dance: “You can have a leader, you can have a choreographer, but at the end of the day, if everybody is not in sync and understands their role, it won’t match with the music.” The metaphor is apt since the Spokes team functions without a single leader, so each member must contribute to organizing and carrying out the journey.
Sullivan also has a robust background in teaching. Having served as an Eagle Scout in high school, he believes having taught 11 to 12 year old Cub Scouts has prepared him to teach STEM to young children.
The 2025 Spokes team meets on Monday nights in one of Green Library’s reservable study rooms to plan the trip. On a March 3 meeting, the seven members filed in, relaxed and comfortable around one another.
Sullivan, who is in charge of fundraising, updated his teammates on his meetings with Stanford departments and outside donors. The group’s biggest challenge is securing funding for the all-important van that will follow them on their journey.
Adam Hussain ’26 proposed a new tradition. “We should start with a question of the day,” he said, beginning by asking the six other members of the cohort about their siblings. He promised that future questions would become “progressively more and more intimate until we all know each other cripplingly well.”