It’s the palm trees.

It’s the one-hundred and sixty-six Canary Island palm trees lining Palm Drive. It’s the Quad, sandstone shimmering in sun. It’s freshly trimmed grass - green, even in drought - and Stanford waffles at breakfast. It’s the block S, styled in a consistent Cardinal red that matches the equipment at the new Arrillaga gym, which matches the equipment at the old Arrillaga gym. It’s smiling students, fountain hopping, and “chilling on the Oval.”

It’s Stanford, and as much as it’s a university, it’s a brand - one of most successful in the world. A multi-billion dollar enterprise, our university comes complete with legions of administrators and bureaucrats tasked with forming and maintaining a distinct institutional identity. That identity aspires to perfection, a utopian image of blue skies, bright minds, and back-to-back bowl game appearances. I imagine someone lost their job when it rained on Admit Weekend.

The brand is selling well. Stanford recently unseated Harvard as the Princeton Review’s number one “dream college,” and alumni donations are at an all-time high. This could not happen by accident. Stanford is run like a Fortune 500 company, and as it grows increasingly competitive with other elite universities for students, faculty, and prestige, its branding efforts take on a certain commercial coloration. New buildings open to an orgy of receptions and press releases, and hashtag campaigns like #NerdNation and #MadeAtStanford are pushed aggressively from above. At the university bookstore, books are buried beneath an entire floor of merchandise. Residential & Dining Enterprises, the division which oversees food, housing, and the layoff of beloved chefs, often seems unable to decide if it’s the subset of a not-for-profit university or a ruthless capitalist corporation. Their mission statement struts across the distinction: “creating a culture of excellence to realize our vision to be the best in the business” (emphasis mine; absurdity theirs).

There are a few occasions each year when Stanford opens its campus to others, and the marketing apparatus goes into overdrive. New Student Orientation, Homecoming, Parents’ Weekend, Admit Weekend, and Commencement are known internally as the university’s “Big Five” events, conspicuous to students for the increased presence of golf carts, shiny pamphlets, and balloon arches of red and white. These are the times when past, present, and future associates of Stanford crowd the dining and lecture halls to get a taste of life on the Farm; to hear the university’s values extolled in discussions like “Arts Endeavors” and “The Entrepreneurial Spirit at Stanford.” It’s not a tough sell: the university has enough to brag about without needing to embellish. From its financial resources, to the diversity of student life, to the scope and splendor of the campus, Stanford really is a special place. We are lucky to be here, and the Big Five events invite us to revel in our good fortune.

Yet somehow it is during these same events that I feel most alienated from Stanford. I spent the first few nights of NSO texting family and friends in despair, telling them that I had made the wrong choice. Stanford isn’t a real college, I told them, just a gorgeous veneer cobbled from buzzwords and PowerPoints! My parents knew better, and reminded me that I was going through the same bumpy transition that confronts freshmen at every college. But my anxiety was amplified by a genuine fear that my entire time at Stanford would feel as over-institutionalized as my first week on campus. While events like Band Run and Faces offered promising glimpses into a more real, less dry future, I didn’t jive with the rhetoric being espoused at most events, and programming back at my dorm often felt forced. Why did deans try to convince us that we unquestionably deserved to be at Stanford? How could I accept the dorm mates I had known for three hours as my new family?

I didn’t see much evidence that there would be more to life at Stanford than ice cream socials and awkward dance parties. I had faith that a more profound experience was just around the corner, but I worried about what that would look like at a university intent on preceding the good stuff with a week of such calculated posturing.

In truth, I had nothing to worry about. Whenever the university presents itself in an ideal fashion, key aspects of its reality get swept under the rug, but they do not cease to exist. Outside of my NSO bubble, upperclassmen across campus were illegally modifying their rooms, using lots of substances, and generally thriving. Few of them felt nostalgic for their first week as freshmen.

The NSO facilitators couldn’t have told me about all the friends I’d make outside of my dorm once the chants were over and the stolen flags returned. They couldn’t have predicted that I wouldn’t really feel at home at Stanford until I rushed and pledged Theta Delt toward the end of the year. And they couldn’t have anticipated all the moments that would take place outside the classroom, off-campus, and even out of the country that would nonetheless come to feel like essential moments in the collage of what “Stanford” means to me. These are the strange and fantastic nuances of authentic experience, which NSO has no means to portray: the time I longboarded down Palm Drive at sunrise after staying up all night with friends; the week my roommate and I spent in Russia after applying to a free trip on a whim; last night, when I procrastinated finishing this piece because I found myself locked in a three-hour game of musical improv, complete with guitars, bongoes, and a relentless barrage of freestyling. These are the moments I will remember, and there’s no space for any of them on the admissions brochure.

At Stanford, many grapple with something we call Duck Syndrome - the sensation that you are the only one paddling furiously below the water, while all the other ducks appear to be gliding gracefully on the surface. This image is propagated in part by the intense idealization that takes place during events like Admit Weekend and NSO. Our school, normally a laid-back land of weirdos and misfits, gets landscaped and manicured into the veneer of Stanford™, the only place in the world where you can have The Stanford Experience™. We are handed a proclamation of how things should be, and we find it hard to admit when our own experiences don’t match up. I wasted much of freshman year anxiously measuring the distance between the Stanford I knew and the Stanford I idealized, often missing the beauty of my unique experiences in the process. It was only once I began to un-learn the image I had been sold during NSO that I could embark on the long and twisting journey toward finding my own Stanford.

To the the new freshmen (may your aesthetic sensibilities be so acute that you have already stumbled upon the Arts Review): relax. Even if you’re not having an ideal Orientation, the Stanford experience might still be for you. If it wasn’t already obvious, students here don’t spend all their days in panel discussions and scheduled icebreakers - it’s college, we do whatever the fuck we want. Sometimes that involves taking advantage of the pretty pathways carved out by Stanford’s official opportunities, and other times it means taking your bike off-road and blazing the trail for yourself. When the gritty dirt of university bureaucracy offers resistance, pedal harder. They can take our houses, but they can’t kill our vibe.

Because somewhere beyond the palm trees, the branding, and the Cardinal red tape, there is still a Stanford where the wind of freedom blows. I will meet you there.

Jake Friedler (‘15, Comparative Literature) grew up in White Suburbia, CA and is still trying to get out. His interests include haiku poetry, long conversations, and the re-mystification of our postmodern wasteland.