“Asking Stanford” is a series of small stories from Stanford students that come together to highlight the diversity of experiences and perspectives on campus.

Alarmy — Ribka Desta ’27

Alarmy is the most violent and humiliating alarm app available on the App Store. Rather than simply switching off the alarm when it starts blaring, the app forces you to complete a specific task to make it stop shrieking. This could mean completing math equations, snapping a picture of a random household item, or taking a certain number of steps. Users can pre-define the severity of whichever task they choose (in terms of quantity or quality) while setting the alarm. Knowing myself (and the social duty I must fulfill to my neighbors and their ears), the obligation to complete these tasks as soon as humanly possible wakes me up perfectly.

Find My — Kaylee Chan ’27

I am chronically bad at remembering where I have placed my personal belongings. In elementary school, I’d let my pencils roll under the desk and leave my homework on the couch armrest without noticing. The consequences of this habit became more dire when I came into possession of more expensive items. The only reason why I was able to keep my phone throughout high school was thanks to Find My, and it has been just as useful in helping me locate my belongings in college. The sound alert works best in quiet lecture halls, or when I’ve somehow lost an Airpod in my room. Some locations are less optimal. Once, I had somehow misplaced my phone while watching my friend’s ballet performance at Dinkelspiel. I found myself crouching down in the rows of auditorium seats trying to hear the Find My ping in the middle of the post-show celebratory cacophony. My phone made its way into the hand of another audience member who handed it to me across the aisle, phone still ringing.

Google Calendar — Megan D’Souza ’29

Being a Stanford student means juggling coffee chats, club meetings, classes, office hours, dance practices and speaker events — sometimes all in the same day. I often find myself losing track of where I need to be next. Without Google Calendar, I’d constantly be lost or double-booked, trying to piece together my schedule from memory. Instead, those color-coded blocks give structure to my day, helping me move from one commitment to the next with a sense of control.

Microsoft Word — Lily Zou ’29

I know, I’m basically a grandma. My first ever memory of a computer was in the second grade, typing up my story on Microsoft Word with my dad’s help. Since then, all my personal writing has been done on Word: countless abandoned novels, short stories, poems and snippets. In my mind, Google docs is for school and work; when I open a Word document, I’m writing for myself.

Weather — Sharis Hsu ’28

Last quarter, amidst the struggles of winter quarter, I tapped into the weather app and saw snow on the forecast. SNOW? IN PALO ALTO? I was ecstatic. After 20 years of living in the Bay Area, my dreams were finally going to be realized. There would be snow at 4 a.m., on a random day in February. I awoke early in the morning, eager to see this rare phenomenon only to discover that it was not snowing. Upon opening the weather app, snow was no longer on the forecast. I went back to bed disappointed in both the lack of snow and the weather app. I look at the forecast with some doubts these days, but most of the time, the weather app is my trusted friend. 

RedNote — Alaina Zhang ’27

This is probably the only app I doom-scroll on these days. From the newest celebrity tea to cool fashion ideas to promising show releases, I get all of my “news” of the world here. It’s my way of staying on top of what is happening in China. Recently, there’s been a lot of K-pop on my feed, such as CORTIS and their new song and a million dance covers and tutorials of REDRED and BTS’s 2.0. Most of the time I spend my time perusing an endless list of different random thought experiments like “How to portray the emotion of jealousy in a character through writing?”, introspective posts like “Why do I have anxiety when I receive a text?” and finding art references for my newly-ignited desire to design original characters with cool outfits during the busiest quarter.