There is a specific, slightly unhinged kind of happiness that I did not have a name for until I came here. It is the joy of waking up with more things to be excited about than you could ever possibly get to. So much of my life before this ran on invented constructs of scarcity, on making up for lost time, on the low hum of not-enough and wanting more. The Farm runs on the opposite. I started calling it drowning in gold, and I have kept using the phrase because it is exactly right: you are surrounded, submerged, slightly overwhelmed, and the thing pulling you under is pure abundance.

Consider an ordinary morning. I wake up and I have to choose. Do I spend the day shadowing a surgeon in the medical school, or joining an international policy seminar by a former ambassador to Russia, or attending a business class taught by a tech CEO who built the billion-dollar company the case is written about? There is a field trip to a cutting-edge drone delivery startup. There is a conference next door on a niche industry I have never once thought about in my life. There is a star professor running a small group lunch discussion, and a sand volleyball court, and an outdoor pool, and a birthday dinner, and a gymnastics competition between dueling Olympic medalists, all of it within a quick bike ride from my bedroom. None of it is required. Every last piece of it is an elective activity I signed up for. That is the trick of this place: it removes every excuse, and then it hands you a forest.

I think about Stanford as a forest, a campus of infinite trees. Every department is a different species. You get planted in one small grove, the business school in my case, and the temptation is to believe that grove is the whole of it. It is not. You can get on a bike and ride to any grove, any tree you want. Some of them you will climb all the way to the top and see things you could never have guessed at from the ground. Some of them you will only ever stand beneath, aching a little, knowing you ran out of time before you ran out of curiosity. You cannot climb them all. Nobody can. But you would have to work fairly hard to be bored in a forest like this, under weather this good, with nothing real standing in your way: not the weather, not the bureaucracy, not the distance.

I applied to GSB four times before I got in. Three interviews, two waitlists, one yes. I am not embarrassed by that anymore. I wanted this so badly for so long that when the abundance finally arrived, I decided I was not going to waste a gram of it. Nine classes in a single quarter. The things none of my classmates were doing. The undergraduate clubs where I was the lone business school guy in the room, watching kids a decade younger than me be sharper than I ever was at their age. I have been, by my own cheerful admission, a yes-man to adventure and activity for two straight years, and I regret none of it.

But I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this sound like a story about consumption, about how much I managed to grab. It is not. The longer I am here, the more convinced I am that the gold I have been drowning in was never really the classes or the field trips. It was the students, faculty, speakers and mentors that orbit this place. Stanford is a perpetual conference, a non-stop convening of interesting human beings, except stripped of the lanyards and the stress and the sickness and the awful hotel coffee. A conference, when you think about it, is just an excuse to put people in a room together. This campus does that every single day, on purpose, with all the infrastructure built precisely to manufacture collisions: the dining halls, the clubs, the events that organize themselves without your lifting a finger, the professors who live in the suburbs and drift back to GSB Town Square, the mentors a fifteen minute drive away. The abundance that matters, the abundance I will actually miss, has a pulse.

This is the part I have started bracing for, with merely days left and a countdown running in my head that I cannot switch off. I have done this before. I know what it feels like to graduate and leave a beloved university. You step off the manicured campus into a world of friction, where things break and people wait and the person you most want to see is a forty-minute drive each way for a thirty-minute coffee. Steve Blank told me that this place is a bowl of raisins and the real world is raisin bread, the same good raisins spread much farther apart, and that out there you have to swim a long way to reach any single one. 

So let me say the true thing while I am still inside the feeling, rather than narrating it sadly from somewhere down the line. The reason all this abundance has felt like gold and not just noise is that there has been, the whole time, an abundance of people who are in it with me. People who are going through this shared project together. There is no clean word for that, for the sense that people linger on the dorm rooftop after everyone’s said goodnight, that the WhatsApp class chat lights up at midnight for no reason, that a pizza-and-dancing-and-sparklers filled birthday party can appear out of thin air on a Tuesday and feel, briefly, like the whole point of being alive. The late Marina Keegan, writing for her own commencement at Yale a long time ago, called it the opposite of loneliness and admitted she had no better name for it either. Neither do I. I only know I have been swimming in it.

I came here moving like there was never enough time, and I am leaving knowing there was always enough of what mattered. The change I am proudest of is not anything on my transcript. It is that I finally learned what the gold actually was. Not the trees. The fact that there were always other people in the forest, climbing their own trees, calling across to me, glad that I was also there.