The Toyon assignment landed in July. I was in Seattle, at the end of a housing saga that had already collected a respectable stack of graduate housing rejections, never once with a reason. I was distraught. I was about to start my last year of college, for real this time, and I would be spending it across the hall from sophomores. I opened the housing change portal before I finished reading the email.

When I arrived a week into the quarter, I met my roommates, my neighbors, my RAs. Every one of them was younger than me. Coterm year was supposed to be a soft launch into adulthood: cooking with friends in Rains, board game nights in Munger. This still happened. But what I didn’t expect was returning home to communal bathrooms and anguished complaints about Math 51, a class I had taken so long ago it felt like a relic.

But somewhere between the shared sinks and the homework panic, I entered a new world. These were kids who lived through COVID in middle school. I was in the first class to come back, and we re-established so many traditions that my neighbors now treat as a given. Sitting beside people just beginning, I could finally see the whole arc at once.

My journey at Stanford has been nontraditional, to say the least. I came in pre-med, then CS, then econ, then CS again, then bioengineering and finally electrical engineering, with a materials science coterm? Plus a CISAC thesis and a great deal of sewing. My Indian parents are still perplexed by the amount of sewing in my dorm room and the endless sketches.

Sleepless nights in Huang, asleep on a conference table because the work was not done. Numb hands as I sewed 200 shells onto a ballgown and sawed two hundred chains for a single dress. The smell of solder as I finished a class project. Running around the Stanford house in Oxford with the new Saltburn tracklist in my ears. Watching, and helping with, Stanford’s first fashion show. Seeing FashionX become what it is today after our first clothing collection (shoutout to the poster still in Tresidder). “Stanford hates fun” finally giving way to traditions no one will let die. Listening to my neighbors talk about yearly events that my own friends, the Class of 2025, started.

After all of this, the university, in its infinite and bureaucratic wisdom, sent me back to where I started. Toyon sits a stone’s throw from Larkin, the dorm where I moved in as a wide-eyed freshman who thought four years was a long time. Every morning of my final year, I woke to a view of Hoover Tower, bikes zipping past my window, and the early chatter drifting over from athlete dining.

Toyon did not give me the year I asked for. I wanted a quiet apartment, a real kitchen, and dignified solitude. Instead I got thin walls and a hallway that never fully went quiet. And somehow that was the point. Toyon refused to let me graduate early in spirit, to start treating Stanford like a place I had already half left. It kept me porous, surrounded, a little inconvenienced, and entirely present. My coterm year was never the soft launch into adulthood I had planned. It was one last year of being in it, completely, beside people for whom all of it was still brand new.

I end these five years wanting five more.  I don’t think any number of years will ever be enough.

But I look back to my mornings in Neptune (formerly Slavianskii Dom), the walks to Verve for my matcha tonic, the Coupa breakfast wraps (sub the wrap for sourdough), and I know it is never enough. The warm summer nights at Corner Yogurt will never be enough, and the walks around the lake at the perfect sunset will never cease to amaze me. The taste, the feeling, the warmth will hopefully stay. Linger, even.

So if you find yourself at some point questioning: To coterm or to not coterm?

I implore you to take the extra year, because you might end up in Toyon and be as lucky as I was.