Spence Green

There is a difference between doing and talking. When Stanford accepted my application in March, I received permission to use its name and mine in the same sentence. The associated has already changed my life in ways both obvious and imperceptible. People outside of school seem to regard me as more intelligent, more qualified, for instance. This perception lacks justification because I have not changed. What observers fail to see, though, is not that I expect more of myself, but that any performance differential that existed between me and my peers has vanished. Now I am just one of many who attends the great school, studies a grand subject, and whose callow idee fixe has become a inchoate association with destiny. The object of graduate study, it seems, is to fill that form.

A winding path now extends from my desk to a distant time and place when I will leave here with a strengthened mind licensed with a beige clip of paper. The paving stones are long, solitary days spent in mental labor. Talking has lost its luster, because at the end of each conversation, there is the knowledge that while I talked, others were busy doing, and I must work that much harder to catch them.