What’s It Like to be a Stanford Student?
By Karla Tapia & Alejandro Lara
At school, we’re constantly talking about college. Karla is very interested in Stanford because she’s planning on being a pediatrician. She heard of Stanford being one of the top universities in the whole state for medical school. So, in order to find out more about what it’s like to be a student at Stanford, we first talked to Mr. Ozdogu, our Journalism teacher, about when he went to Stanford as a graduate student.
Mr. Ozdogu stated, “I worked really really hard in high school. I worked really really hard at my first college which was UCLA. And then, I actually had to work in the field of education for a few years afterwards and then prove that I was worthy to go to Stanford. And when I got there, it was well worth it.”
Since it’s hard to be one of Stanford’s students, Mr. Ozdogu worked really hard to attend Stanford. Thanks to his hard work, he accomplished going to a very good university.
We also asked, “Did you enjoy being in Stanford? Why or why not?” Mr. Ozdogu replied, “Yes. It was very very difficult and it was very exhilarating and fun.”
Even though being able to attend Stanford was very difficult, Mr. Ozdogu had fun being in Stanford.
In addition, we asked Ms. McCarty, “What did you expect from college before being in Stanford?”
She told us, “I expected it to be a time when I would learn a lot; not just on my classes but that I would also get to meet a lot of new people and learn about different places since it was somewhere– you know a little bit far away from where I’d grown up where it was in Northern California and I’d grown up in L.A., and I expected also, to have the opportunity to study something that I was really interested in instead of just you know, forced of what I had to study in high school.”
Ms. McCarty wanted to study something she was interested in, not what she was forced to study in high school even though studying was going to be far away from where she grew up.
We wanted to know how the graduate experience different from the undergraduate experience.
Ms. McCarty told us that “Undergraduate life at Stanford was really fun. All of the undergraduates live on campus almost; I think the statistic is like 96 to 97 percent live on campus in dorms. Most of the dorms have like 100 to 200 students in them; so that you really get to know the people who live there. You live with them for a whole year, and it’s so small that you become like a community. The dorm life is a lot of fun there’s a lot of activities faced around dorm life and you all just kind of become friends.
That was a lot of fun, it’s something that as an only child I didn’t get a lot of growing up; It was really fun to live with a hundred of people who were the same age as me and it was also really cool to get to choose my classes every quarter, to get to decide kind of what path I wanted to go in into as I was studying different things to realize… oh I am very passionate about this, I want to take more classes of this one… oh I really like this professor, I want to take more classes from them, or I like the small discussion format… I want to take more classes like that.”
In Stanford, Ms. McCarty was able to enjoy being with a lot of people because she didn’t get a lot of growing up when she was a child, because she is an only child. She had really fun because she was able to choose her classes and classes she liked.
In conclusion, it is amazing and interesting being a Stanford student. Both of our experts worked really hard. Therefore, students at LPS-San Jose should learn the amount of work they have to do and how much it takes to attend a college, especially if they want to go to a very good college or university like Stanford.
admin @ February 24, 2009