Be Careful with your bike...

Introduction
Palo Alto is dead. It’s a bunch of old people and rug stores and coffee shops.

Campus Life and Social Life
Stanford is extremely diverse. Like we have racial diversity, sexuality diversity, intellectual, athletic everything that you can expect because it really creates that portfolio, but we don’t get a real world sense or any city, urban feel whatsoever. Palo Alto is not a college town, it’s not a city at all and San Francisco’s far away. They tell you it’s really close, you can go to the city whenever you want and it’s like an hour CalTrain Ride and then the CalTrain was broken for like 2 years so no one could take it on the weekends so, if you didn’t have a car, and then Parking in the city is a pain so, anybody that wants a more independent, less campy, outside, real world meet diff. People of diff socio-economic status too is a big thing, even though we do have people varying levels, it’s definitely a much more upper, upper middle class school. Advertisement
Academics
The Pre-Med course: the first one that you take like Introductory Chemistry and Physics and everything, are really really cutthroat, hard core, everybody’s really intense. Everyone works ridiculously hard all the time so you kind of feel that pressure and it creates this atmosphere of intense studying that people do all the time. They call it “The Duck Effect” is what I’ve heard because if you look at ducks swimming across a pond it all looks really calm and smooth but underneath they’re all paddling and kicking really hard. That’s kind of the mentality at Stanford, esp. for the Pre-Meds.

Student Body
Apparently there’s some statistic where there’s a bike accident every 7 seconds and that happens right at the clock tower where there’s actually like an accident every 7 seconds in that one spot. And I’ve had 4 in the 4 years that I’ve been here. All of them have been stolen. I don’t really know how, they’ve all been locked too, people just carry them off and cut the U-Locks , I don’t know and they weren’t even nice bikes, they were like Wal-Mart bikes that cost like $50…so now I just walk everywhere I don’t even want to buy another bike, it’s a waste. Plus, I don’t want to get in a bike accident.

In Closing...
People are very intense here about their school work, about their extra-curriculars and they’re very intense about their relationships. So they either find someone and like betroth them, or just have casual hook ups that are also really intense and dramatic.