A message to the graduating class of 2026: 

It’s the second day of New Student Orientation, fall of 2022. Hundreds of us are packed into Tresidder, crammed into the library and hunched over laptops, frantically refreshing Axess, our course enrollment website, for the first time. I still didn’t know where the gym was. I couldn’t find my way to class without Google Maps. But I knew one thing with absolute certainty: If I didn’t get into Chem 31M, my life was over.

So we kept refreshing. And refreshing. All 2,000 of us were convinced that the classes we picked for our first quarter at Stanford would define us. Ironically, the entire Axess system crashed. Website down. Gone. If you didn’t know, our school invented the internet. 

You might be wondering… why were we so stressed about class enrollment? Because from the start, we were told to make the most of Stanford. We had just arrived at one of the most extraordinary places on earth. Of course we were going to experience it. We were going to experience ALL of it.  

Make the most of Stanford. I’ll be honest, that phrase has kept me up at night. It followed me into every quarter, every coffee chat at Coupa, every moment I said yes to something. Because at Stanford, everything is an extraordinary opportunity. Taking a class with the former Secretary of State, watching a heart transplant at the hospital as a sophomore, having VCs invest in your Treehacks project.

But that also means everything is an opportunity cost. Do you go to office hours with your professor who happens to be a Nobel laureate, or do you attend the fireside chat with Jensen Huang? Do you go cheer for the women’s artistic swimming team as they win their 11th national championship, or do you watch your dorm-mate compete in the Olympics?  

For a while, I thought I’d only find success by experiencing all of it. So I tried. This past year, I had to choose between dropping out to build a startup I believed in, or continuing on the path I’d dreamed of since I was a kid: becoming a doctor. And for the first time, I felt like no matter what I chose… I’d lose something I cared about. And that failure terrified me. 

I still don’t know if I chose right. But that’s exactly the magic of Stanford: It teaches you to choose between great and great. It teaches you that you don’t actually need to know if you’re right. But by choosing, you discover what truly matters to you.  

I had a friend who gave up a finance internship and chose to spend the summer in SF teaching a class named “the economic impact of Taylor Swift concerts on the GDP of developing countries.” 

My freshman year roommate had to choose between playing in our senior class’s first ever Big Game win or signing with the NFL. He chose the NFL. We forgive him.

Stanford itself hasn’t figured it out either. In the last four years, it still can’t choose what website to use for class enrollment: Axess, Enroll Alternate, SimpleEnroll, Navigator.

Through all of this, I’ve learned that the opportunities we didn’t take don’t just disappear. Because there was no such thing as one Stanford to experience. There were and will be thousands of them, each shaped by a different set of choices. Different classes, different people, different moments that could have been ours.  

This discrepancy is not a loss. Because the version we lived — the one shaped by the choices we actually made — is the only version that was ever meant to be ours.

Stanford won’t be the last place that will ask you to choose. The world you’re walking into after graduation will keep offering more paths than you can take. More opportunities than any one person can hold.

When that happens, I want you to think back to that day of NSO. To hundreds of us staring at a 404 ERROR screen, convinced we were about to miss our chance. But we didn’t. We found our classes! Or maybe we didn’t because Social Dance was always full, so we chose a random TAPS class instead. We found our place! Even if we couldn’t get a table at CoHo, we found a different study spot. And eventually, we discovered our purpose. Not because we did everything, but because we chose something. And then we chose again. And again.

That’s what it means to make the most of Stanford. Not everything. Something.

So as we leave this magical, beautiful, indescribable place that we’ve come to call home, I leave you with this:  

Choose.

Choose boldly, even when you don’t know if it’s right.

Choose fully, even when you wonder what you’re giving up.

Choose the path that feels meaningful over the path that feels safe.

Choose something — and make that choice matter.

Congratulations, Class of 2026, I can’t wait to see what you choose.