I. To the girl who didn’t cry on the last bus home from Enterprise Middle School:

Brick walls, the track where you ended all those cross country meets, the familiar loop packed with friendly yellow buses. The bus driver will take the fun way home, over the big hill.

To your right, Annie is crying. It’s strange. You’ve never seen her cry before. You try to muster up some emotion, but it’s just a building. Besides, most of your friends are going to the same high school as you, so what’s really going to change? Maybe, you think, I’ll cry when I graduate high school. 

Due to circumstances you never could have foreseen, you won’t get a high school graduation. But eight years later, sitting at your desk at Stanford (I know, it’s crazy! Can you believe it?), you’ll be wondering the same thing. This time, will I cry when it’s over? 

Enterprise was just a place to you. So was Hanford, in many ways. But Stanford is more than that — for three years, at least, it was your home. 

When are you supposed to feel like you’ve reached the end?

II. To the high school senior on the eve of her Stanford acceptance

I see you pacing back and forth. A word of advice: When you record the reaction to your decision, do not turn the camera off right when you see the word “congratulations!” You’ll miss, like, most of the reaction! You could use that video to kickstart a lucrative YouTube channel!

You’re worried, I know, about being alone. You’re worried that you’ll always be a little too weird. But you have nothing to worry about. In college, you will grow into the personality that was a bit too big for your small hometown. And you will make the best friends in the world. They will be extraordinary people, the kind of people who you will be grateful to know. They will love you for who you are.

Your loneliness will be replaced by a different kind of sadness: the pain of saying goodbye. After graduation, everyone tells you, everything is different. Who knows how often you’ll speak to these people again? 

As Tennyson tells us, it’s “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” So, though it hurts to part ways, you will consider yourself lucky to have loved so much. 

Hang in there. Better days are just around the corner.

III. To the frosh who got a 73% on her first college exam:

Girl, take a deep breath. It’s a shock, I know. You’ve never seen a score so low in your life. 

You’re in no state to listen to me right now, but I will tell you that it literally does not matter. Your inability to make Karel pick_beeper() does not mean that you’re incapable of studying computer science. You will not fail CS106A. You will find your footing and flourish. In four years, you’ll make a whole video game, and they’re going to give you an award for being in the top of your class.

You know, so many things seem earth-shattering when they’re happening, but in the end, everything will work out the way it’s supposed to. Try to chill out and enjoy the moment, if you can. You won’t be a student forever.

IV. To you in the future, wherever you are:

I hope you’re well. I won’t speculate on the path our life has taken, because as you know, I have so often been wrong.

I write to you from my very last week of school. I don’t know how to feel, to be honest. Most of the time, I don’t feel anything — one perk of being extremely busy, I guess. But now and again, a funny feeling bubbles up inside my chest. What is it? Knowing that I have a limited number of Wilbur dinners in my future? Not knowing who I’ll be saying goodbye to for the last time? 

I wonder if you still get that funny feeling every once in a while.

Anyway, I know you’re busy, so I just have one small request. If you ever think back on your time at Stanford, don’t just remember the tests and the problem sets and the algorithm for stochastic gradient descent (which you must have seen at least a million times). Please remember the Stanford that I love. 

Remember craning your neck whenever you saw the dog walker, and remember the joy you felt on the day that someone poured bubbles into the Green Library fountain. Remember stepping out of winter quarter lectures in Huang basement into the cold night air of the Engineering Quad. Remember the countless late nights spent idling with your best friends; the mad scramble to exterminate a roach during your last week in Toyon; all those freezing bike rides back from orchestra rehearsal and the way the golden light drenched campus in the late afternoon.

This is what it was like to be young. 

I wish you all the best. Write back if you can, okay?

Yours,

Michelle Fu

(06/04/2024)