In each installment of “Senior Scaries,” Erin Ye ’26 confronts her senior-year fears in her final quarters at Stanford. You’ll hear about the triumphs and tribulations of tackling the Senior Bucket List™ and hopefully feel less alone in the never-ending soul search that comes with growing up.
There comes a time in one’s life when you realize that assignments can get done during Thanksgiving break, but you can only experience Big Game Week one last time.
It started this past summer. I was in New York City, sitting on the rooftop of my friend Odin’s apartment building, laid out on a lounge chair that overlooked the water. We were discussing what we could pull off during our senior year of college that would become impossible after Stanford.
Odin and I have been friends since our freshman year, when we both lived in Castaño. He and his roommate Kevin pulled a prank on the dorm where they left fake inspirational Post-it Notes on everybody’s door. Mine said, “You’re pretty! Pretty fucking stupid. GOD.” When I confronted them about my Post-it clearly being the most aggressive, they said it was because I was the only person who they thought could take the joke. I guess I took that as a compliment.
A real full circle moment of our friendship is that as seniors, we get to be co-resident assistants (RAs) in Mars. We bounced around a couple of event ideas for the year. A pool party. A trampoline park. A 50-person seafood boil.
“What if we did a presidential turkey pardoning on the lawn?”
“Like, with a real turkey?”
“And what if it was for Big Game, with Andrew Luck?”
There was definitely more back and forth than just that, but you get the gist. We sent an impassioned audio message to Suz and Dash, our other two costaff, and were (maybe shockingly) met with overwhelming enthusiasm. That set a plan in motion for the greatest Big Game Week of our lives.
You may ask, why a turkey pardoning? Why go through the effort of sourcing a live turkey (in a not exactly liquid market) and explaining that you want it to be ceremonially fake-pardoned by the general manager of the football team, who is neither the president nor a figure of authority over the turkey’s life?
Because it’s fun and weird and uniquely Stanford. Because it’s only here that you can even pitch an idea like this, let alone get all parties involved to agree. It was a stunt to drum up hype for Big Game, and it was a chance to create some of the silliness and magic that I associated with Stanford back when I applied. I love college football, I love the house I live in and I love this school — the turkey pardoning was a profession of love to all of those things.
I feel like you never really know that something is going to happen until the very moment that it does; sometimes it doesn’t sink in until the moment has already passed. We spent weeks searching far and wide for an available live turkey, and when we finally got confirmation for one, I was worried it would fall through all the way up until Tom the Turkey actually arrived onto the premises. When I woke up to Andrew Luck’s response to our email, I questioned whether we’d sent it to the wrong address and gotten an impersonator instead.
The days leading up to the pardoning were a full-on production. Our residents painted a banner to hang from their windows. Odin made an AI-generated NFL-Sunday-style walk up audio. We threw lights up on the house, sourced a red carpet for the stairs and searched far and wide to find a podium-style lectern.
Andrew Luck said he was going to show up at 7 p.m., and he was even five minutes early. When I asked him if he’d ever been to Mars before, he laughed and said, “I was an undergrad here, too.” It’s good to know that the people we look up to as giants in their fields can also be kind people and class acts when you meet them up close.
For the pardoning speech itself, I based it loosely on President Barack Obama’s 2016 pardoning of Tater and Tot. It would be up to Mr. Luck to deliver it with conviction, and he did not disappoint. The fact that I was standing next to an all-time Stanford great, holding a live turkey in front of a sea of people, was not something that sunk in until hours later. It may never fully register.
In the days that followed, I like to think I continued the ethos of seizing the moment. Before anyone graduates from Stanford, I would encourage you to do everything you used to think was weird or scary. After holding Tom and getting a fist pump from Andrew Luck, there were only two things left for the week that petrified me: doing the naked run and having all of my hope drained by us losing for another year in a row. Luckily, only one of those things happened, and it wasn’t even that scary.
I’ll leave you with one last fact: we are 1-0 at Big Game when a turkey gets pardoned on the Mars lawn.