The #StanfordExperience teems with official fun. Fun is rally clothes; fun is kissing a random person at Full Moon on the Quad; fun is playing sand volleyball on Wilbur Field; fun is 72 degrees in February. Many of these Farm experiences are indeed fun. And they are central to the Stanford ethos (read: brand), right up there with the palm trees and Silicon Valley. The well-intended emphasis on having a good time, however, sometimes has the opposite effect: a sense of lonesomeness rooted in the worry that you yourself are not having the fun you think you’re supposed to be having. At the start of this new year, I find myself asking: Is everyone faking just a little? Does the standard of official Stanford fun inadvertently create artificial fun?

Nowhere is this official fun more enforced than during New Student Orientation (NSO).

Freshmen spend a week before classes learning all things Stanford, from how to do laundry to Title IX policy. Looped in is a lesson on the culture of Stanford fun.

Around this time last year, I arrived at my freshman dorm, suitcases in hand, and was immediately greeted by a line of smiling, cheering people in tutus and leopard print. They screamed my name as I walked up the ramp. I smiled awkwardly and panicked on the inside — how did they know my name? Why were they dancing? Is that Demi Lovato playing? I would soon learn these were my RAs, dressed in rally (Stanford’s uniform of fun). Indeed it was a warm and cheery welcome, one I so desperately wanted to appreciate. But at the time all I could focus on was that I just wasn’t having the fun they seemed to be having. I’d been on campus all of 10 minutes, and was convinced I was doing Stanford wrong.

The first night of NSO we were told to wear comfortable shoes, and led outside to join a thick procession of jogging freshmen. Together we ran not knowing why or where we were going until we reached the Main Quad. There, the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band assembled and performed in an electric blur of horns, drum beats, high kicks and sequins. Sixteen hundred of us danced and the quad shook beneath our feet. I was hot and wanted to be asleep but swayed my hips anyway and pretended to be into it. And then, magically, I fooled myself into the fun! For a few moments, at least.  

I remember telling people afterwards, “Wow, that was so fun!” and yes; perhaps it was for an interval, but the reality was sweaty, overwhelming and scary. Scarier still was to admit the fear, because after all, it was supposed to fun! The schedule said so!

Top-down fun is reinforced by social media documentation. Big, photographable events beat out the normal, quiet moments because the former live on ad infinitum on Facebook or Instagram. Formal fun becomes a certified memory in the rolodex of experiences called tagged photos. And so we remember the event as more fun than it was, and brag in a socially acceptable way to our sphere: Look, this was so awesome!

I was recently perusing my freshman year Facebook album with my sister and came across an early fall picture of a pool party (with none other than the “Farm Life” Snapchat filter). “Wow, that looks so fun!” she exclaimed. My Facebook memory would agree. There are kids with floaties in the big outdoor pool and it looks like paradise. My real memory recounts coming to the pool party with a friend who left and being alone in the pool amongst groups of strangers, trying to muster the courage to introduce myself while clutching a foam noodle. After complimenting a girl’s swimsuit and forgetting to say my name, I got out and ran to my dorm — in short, a painfully awkward hour immortalized on Facebook as a fun day in the sun.

Social media can re-imagine unejoyable events as enjoyable, a fun façade of sorts which pressures our friends/followers to project fun as well, which makes us seek more fun — a silently upheld agreement to pretend we’re having the best time ever, all the time. The truth is: most people aren’t.

This is all to say: Dear freshman, do not despair if you haven’t had as much fun as you think you everyone else is having! Fun, by definition, is unofficial. Fun is not dressed in extravagant fanfare, nor is it printed in glossy pamphlets. Fun is humble – it prefers to sneak in between the cracks of all the events, games and activities. And fun is not preserved in an impeccably curated Facebook album of freshman year memories. It lives on only in you. It takes a bit of time and willingness to wade through the force-fed cheer and glitter and perhaps requires a bit of faking along the way. Waiting on the other side of NSO and the first few weeks is a not a pot of golden fun but a sense of normalcy with fun and not-so-fun moments mixed-in. Have fun finding your way!

Contact Madeleine Chang at madeleinechang ‘at’ stanford.edu.