In each installment of “Senior Scaries,” Erin Ye ’26 confronts her senior-year fears in her final three 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.

I don’t think there’s been a period in my life that I’ve felt more prepared for than my Stanford Senior Spring™. Every older friend of mine has told me it’s the best three months of your life. Their advice is to live in the moment, to say yes to everything, to withhold from blinking if I can stand it. I spent all of winter quarter (much to my own annoyance) thinking about spring quarter and then spent all of my spring break plotting for the magic of Week 1. What kind of person worries about Marsgaritaville logistics while touring an Ottoman palace in Istanbul? Me, apparently.

This is my first quarter at Stanford being enrolled in less than 15 units. I’m taking “TAPS 103: Beginning Improvising,” and being really brave about it, despite the fact that acting on stage goes against every core instinct I possess. Most of the “work” I have involves planning events with friends, working shifts at the Visitor Center, and hunting for New York apartments. My Google Calendar looks as full as ever, but it’s because I have things like “Trivia” and “Senior Night” as recurring events, and because I’ve made a goal to never waste a weeknight sitting in my room.

It’s been fun to go to Senior Nights and run into faces I haven’t seen since freshman year. To think about the thousands of different Stanford experiences that have taken place over the same time horizon, and to be rueful that we’re only coming back together for the last moment. This campus won’t be ours for much longer, and I often feel like I’ve already passed along the torch.

In some ways, I feel a pressure to do it all: to RSVP “Going” on every Partiful, to minimize every mandatory obligation so that there’s abundant space for chance encounters. But that feels like the opposite of what senior spring is supposed to be; worrying about my social life meeting the generated hype is just a transformation of the same anxiety I used to feel about my academics and career.

The other day, I was catching up with my former West Lag co-staff over dinner. One of them, who now works at a startup in SF and is on what he calls “a perpetual leave of absence,” said that “students are like stem cells.” We can transform into whatever we want, whenever we want, with little consequence. We can decide to explore a budding interest with a tap of our fingers, and can be free at nearly any hour of the day to try something new. Later in life, no matter what jobs we end up working, there are things to consider outside of our own delight, and I will decidedly miss that.

But we also talked about how the end of childhood seems to be constantly moving upward. So long as there are people older than us, further down the line in their careers and lives than we are, we’re bound to feel young. The growing up is never done.

I’m conscious of the fact that I’m at risk to memorialize the moment while it’s still happening. I don’t want to be the person that says, “This could be our last…” every time my friends and I are together. I want Bay to Breakers to feel like running a victory lap. I want Senior Dinner on the Quad to feel like the last dance. But I also just want to be alive, to throw caution to the wind and do the things that scare me. There’s no right or wrong way to do Senior Spring: as long as I’m here, I can’t fail.