The Stanford Daily M a g a z ine VOLUME I
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Issue 7
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June 2, 2017
The Money Problem Stanford has more students from the top 1 percent of income-earners than the bottom 50 percent. How we got here and what we can do about it p. 10
STANFORD YOUTUBERS p. 4
PREMED ATTRITION p. 14
Bob DYLAN p. 26
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Contents
The Stanford Daily MAGAZINE
Volume I, Issue 7 June 2, 2017
OPINIONS 7 stem literacy at stanford Arnav Mariwala and Nick Pether argue for the universal value of STEM News 4 YOUTUBE FAMOUS Meet three full-time students and part-time YouTubers 10 INCOME INEQUALITY AT STANFORD Why do more students come from the top 1 percent than the bottom 50 percent? The situation and potential solutions
Youtubers A Q&A with the student video-producers behind Cath In College, GeekSlayer and Akshay Dinakar Music. Photos by Chris Delgado — p. 4
GRIND 14 PRE-MED DRopOUTS Vivian Lam investigates the phenomenon of pre-med attrition SPORTS 24 ‘RUNNING’ A FOUNDATION After Olympic careers, Sara and Ryan Hall ’05 started a foundation to fight global poverty
ARTS & LIFE
Creative
20 living while funny Honoring the comedic contributions of leading ladies Tina Fey and Amy Poehler
28 PLANETIZED Ryan Cohen’s 360-degree photo of the Main Quad
22 SF Street ART Daily staffer Starr Jiang captures artwork in the famed Mission District in San Francisco
30 POETRY Three poems submitted by Haley Harrington
26 BOB DYLAN in concert Nick Burns shares the transformatory experience of watching the American Nobel Laureate while abroad
32 CROSSWORD Contributor David Steinberg’s latest creation, “Hats Off ”
On the cover: Illustration by Janet Liu 3
YouTube Famous By Sophie Stuber
CATHERINE GOETZE CATH IN COLLEGE
3:35 / 7:30
Catherine Goetze ’18 has a YouTube channel, “Cath in College,” where she posts videos of her life at Stanford. The channel has about 17,500 subscribers. Goetze also has a blog, cathincollege.com. The Stanford Daily (TSD): So “Cath in College” originally started as a blog, but how did you expand to videos and other media? Catherine Goetze ’18 (CG): I’ve actually been making videos since high school. Basically what I did in high school was videojournalism, but when I got to Stanford, I stopped for a bit just to adjust to school and to Stanford life. … Then I started specifically making videos for “Cath in College” not really with intention until the summer after freshman year. TSD: Has your style changed since the channel gained popularity? CG: At the beginning, it was still totally creating videos just for fun. … I started taking a little more time and care and became much more precise with audio and storylines and storytelling in general. I think that made a world of a difference. TSD: Especially with a larger audience now, how do you choose your content? 4
CG: There are always certain types of videos that will get more views and increase your sub-count, for example. So it can be tempting for some people to just always make those types of videos. The problem arises that… in my case, those videos are not the kind of videos that I like to make and videos that don’t represent me as a person. Videos like how to get into Stanford and how to write a college essay … and to claim that you’re a knowledgeable source that everyone should be referencing for these kinds of decisions and these kinds of life decisions I just think is completely absurd. … So I have done as good of a job that I think I could have done at targeting high school students who are applying to schools like Stanford and [saying], “Give it your best shot, but know that you can have as good of an experience as I am having at Stanford at any other college, depending on your mindset.” If you go into a college thinking this is going to be the best four years of your life, you would be surprised at what you can make of it. TSD: What are your favorite types of videos to produce? CG: The ones that are totally effortless in terms of filming. So for example, when my friends and I go out and I turn on my camera and just hold it in my hand and let my wrist follow the action. So those are my
favorite types of videos: the ones that you watch and think are scripted and that they’re actors, but they’re totally free. TSD: Do you ever worry about how much content you publish online? CG: The limit, or where you draw that line, is something that I think about really often just for my own personal privacy and personal sake, but also for the sake of my friends and family and other people [who are in the videos]. I guess that the best answer that I have to that is just that I always try to stay mindful of that and to exercise caution … when I include any personal information. TSD: How do you see the future of “Cath in College” when you’re not, you know, in college anymore? CG: Yeah, I’m really glad you asked that. … My [content] is very much tied to a larger institution and a place and I’m mindful of that. My goal has never been to sell the University in any way, shape or form, but rather to celebrate how happy I feel here and the things that I have enjoyed here and to show people that they can have that joy no matter where they live. In terms of after-college plans, I don’t know yet. I know my interests are somewhere in the media and communications space.
AKSHAY DINAKAR AKSHAY DINAKAR MUSIC
4:10 / 6:02
Akshay Dinakar ’19 makes violin covers of pop songs for his YouTube channel, “Akshay Dinakar Music,” which has nearly 1,400 subscribers. TSD: What made you decide to create violin song covers for YouTube? Akshay Dinakar ’19 (AD): I started playing violin when I was three. I was originally trained classically, but then in middle school, I really got into jazz and improv, and then in high school, I had a lot of fun taking my violin to school in the mornings and bringing my electric violin and amp. I would play Disney songs in the hallways, and students really enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun doing it for my high school, but I thought it would be even more fun to share with a wider audience, and since most of my relatives are in India, I think that YouTube is a great way to send stuff to them. … YouTubing is a self-paced, fun way to stay in touch with your creative side and make people smile at the same time. … I think it’s nice that YouTube can bring together strangers from all around the world to appreciate good quality art and content.
and keep YouTube involved in different ways. Last year I founded Stanford Flash Mob Orchestra, which is my ensemble here. That group basically creates spontaneous arrangements of flash mob pieces that we perform around campus for YouTube. … Doing something like that, as well as school, takes away time from my own personal YouTubing, but it’s always the sort of thing where if I get tired of school or want a one-hour break just to have fun, I’ll churn out a YouTube video. TSD: Has your video style changed since coming to Stanford? AD: Now it’s becoming more and more planned, which also means that the quantity of my videos is going down, but the quality is increasing a lot and I’m definitely trying out new things. I originally used to just set up a microphone and get out my violin and just record whatever video was right there when I was doing it, and I could make the whole thing in under an hour. Recently I started getting more into music videos. I record it and then I go to some aestheticlooking place to play.
TSD: Has it been difficult to maintain your YouTube channel since coming to Stanford?
TSD: Do you think YouTube has changed the music industry?
AD: Definitely a little bit. I get pretty busy and I try
AD: It’s interesting as a YouTuber to find this balance,
since it’s such a public form of art, between creating content for others and creating content for yourself. … I’m in an art class right now, and one of the biggest discussions we’ve been having is the effect that reproductions have had rather than original pieces of art. It’s very similar [with violin]. Now when someone creates a piece of music, when you think of an artist releasing a piece of music, it’s not just the piece of music itself. There [are] so many other things [that] make money alongside that. You have the music video, Spotify, iTunes. You’re creating something that is not just a live performance but something that is meant to be watched over and over again. In fact, you kind of keep that in the back of your mind when you YouTube. You want something that is catchy, something that goes viral. … Totally changes the way you approach things. TSD: Do you have any fun YouTube anecdotes? AD: I think the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me on YouTube was I made a cover of the song “Heroes” by Alesso. … And the day after I put this video up, I just got a ton of comments that [were] like “Yo check his Snapchat.” And so I went on Snapchat and I found out that Alesso has one of those celebrity Snapchats, so I followed it, and Alesso’s SnapChat was of him watching my cover of his song with the caption “This is fire.” 5
PUNYA CHATTERJEE
GEEKSLAYER
1:01 / 5:59
Punya Chatterjee ’19 makes sketch comedy videos and music video parodies on his YouTube channel, “GeekSlayer,” which has over 77,400 subscribers. You might have seen his parodies of “Bad and Boujee” and “ Rude.” TSD: How did you get into making comedy videos and parody videos? Punya Chatterjee ’19 (PC): Well, I started making videos for my channel back in seventh grade. I just wanted to make my friends laugh, and so I would film videos with a crappy camera my parents had and just make little skits of what I found funny, put them up online. TSD: How has YouTube changed since you were in seventh grade? PC: YouTube has become a very commercial-based platform. … I honestly view them now as caring more about their advertisers than about their creators, which is why recently there’s been this massive exodus of YouTubers quitting, actually. TSD: Are you going to be part of that exodus or are you going to stick around? PC: I think I’m going to stick around. But… it is 6
something interesting that I’m keeping in mind. It’s what I’m writing my RBA [Research-Based Argument] about actually, in PWR [Program in Writing and Rhetoric]. TSD: How did you work to distinguish yourself from the many other comedy videos and parody videos on YouTube? PC: I think a big thing that set me apart was I made a lot of videos for an Indian audience, and being Indian myself there aren’t a whole lot of us on YouTube. … We’re not that represented in media anyway, so it was kind of appealing to other Indian people, seeing people making fun of they way they grew up, or of things that they say in their own lives. Other than that, my music video parodies would always be pretty prominent because people would search for them. TSD: Has your channel changed at all since you came to Stanford? PC: I definitely don’t have as much time to make videos anymore. I’ve wanted to shift my channel to slightly more mature content that would appeal more to people of my own age group, like to college students. But because I started my channel so long ago, I do have kind of a younger following, so there’s kind
of a struggle there about what should I make versus what I want to make. TSD: Could you just give an example of the kind of videos you want to explore more? PC: Well, I’m in a sketch comedy group on campus, the Robber Barons, and I make sketches with them. We do a show every quarter. And I feel like I have freedom there. I have [the] comedic freedom to make more adult jokes, to swear, to do things… that wouldn’t fall under the category of parodies or Indian sketch comedy. So I kind of want to branch into doing that more on my channel. TSD: What’s your favorite video that you’ve made? PC: I really liked my “Black Beatles” parody that I made in December or my “Work” parody that I made in March – last March… I had a great time filming them because I enjoyed making the song and the parody itself. I had fun getting a lot of friends involved being background dancers, characters. I went to a bunch of different locations and shot. So filming was fun, and then those are two of my most successful videos… from the past year, so that’s nice, too. Contact Sophie Stuber at sstuber8@stanford.edu.
What the Humanities Can Learn from STEM Stanford’s mission to provide a liberal arts education often prompts discourse on the importance of the humanities for all students. On the reverse side, however, two Daily columnists are increasingly concerned by the lack of STEM literacy in students from other disciplines
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It’s a two-way street. The humanities must engage with STEM, too. By Arnav Mariwala
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hen it first came out in 1966, “Star Trek” predicted a lot of things — cell phones, tablets, automatic doors, human fondness for alien sexual relations — but not even the trippiest episode could predict a world where someone could snap a disappearing photograph, order a pizza, and send the President an invective-filled 140-character message while sitting on the toilet. Even though we never realized the moon vacations of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” technology nevertheless assumed the central role in our lives that we predicted it would — just in a different way and on a different scale. No wonder, then, that almost half of Stanford students major in a STEM-related field — the only “fuzzy” major among the top five declared last year was Science, Technology, and Society, and that has the first half of STEM in its name. Given the prevalence that STEM enjoys at Stanford, I have not been surprised to encounter a steady stream of talks, lectures, thinkpieces and conversations about the value of the humanities for someone studying the sciences or engineering. A holistic education, so the argument goes, encourages critical thinking, instills an appreciation for diverse viewpoints, helps one discover a purpose to their work along with a sense of ethics and creates a well-rounded individual who is able to coherently and clearly communicate what they think. All of this is undoubtedly true — I pursued a history minor and took SLE as a freshman, both of which made me a better communicator and critical thinker while pushing me to think about the ethics and implications of my scientific work as well. In short, studying the humanities along with my primary field imparted me with useful, practical skills while contributing to my intellectual development. Just as the thinkpieces said they would. However, the same should be said for the converse — that STEM holds immense intellectual and practical value for students of the humanities. Right now, as Amy Shen noted in the Stanford Review, it is possible to graduate without taking a single rigorous science, math, or engineering course — “Physics for Poets” and “Sleep and Dreams” are nowhere near as rigorous as core engineering or math classes. As I had mentioned in a previous column, even a class devoted entirely to critiquing technology had no technical material on its syllabus, making up for it with episodes of “Black Mirror.” This is problematic on both a practical and intellectual level. On a practical level, it is obvious what the implications of a lack of STEM knowledge are. At least five of the ten biggest challenges facing humanity — food security, climate change, artificial intelligence, an open internet, universal healthcare — are problems that require knowledge of the natural sciences and engineering to solve, and this does not even include issues like WMD proliferation, natural disaster protection, and longterm survival of our species. These are the issues that Stanford students will use their education to address when they leave zip code 94305. It is fair to say that some depth of knowledge in the science underlying these processes would go a long way in improving the ability of future policymakers, intellectuals, and businesspeople in addressing these issues. It is hard to talk about eradicating the banana plague or switching the entire electric grid to solar energy without some understanding of the basic biology or engineering that underlie both these problems. 8
In addition to science and technology specific issues, more and more public policy relies on insights from cognitive psychology, large data sets and systems engineering. Indeed, these frameworks are changing the way we make policy from the city level to the national level. On the business side, it is more and more evident that a free and open internet is essential for commercial growth, that new and disruptive technology will upend markets that no one thought was possible to break into and that even something as fundamental as a contract may completely change in the future. Everyone addressing these issues need not be a data scientist or software engineer — but some structured engineering and statistics knowledge would go a long way in improving our ability to address them. More fundamentally, however, the university owes it to its students to ensure that they grow intellectually in all directions. The entirety of human civilization rests on a pale blue dot shooting through space — but the natural world extends for billions of light years beyond it. A truly holistic and liberal education would thus encourage the study of the natural world, not deemphasize it. It is as important to learn how to think systematically, work with data, and apply first principles with mathematical rigor to draw insights about the world around us as it is to learn how to appreciate diverse perspectives, communicate ideas effectively, and contemplate the ‘big questions’ of life. Even as the latter influences the interaction of science and the public, the former has the potential to change the way we think about and create history, literature and the arts. There is a stereotype of the snooty humanities student — someone who dismisses STEM as somehow intellectually impure or a pursuit solely for a material end. I have met very few students like this. The majority have been like me — we were inspired by a natural world that is amazingly complex, beautiful and rich with knowledge. I personally have found elegance and beauty in equations of physics to rival the greatest paintings of Van Gogh — it still amazes me that a set of only four simple differential equations underpin all the modern electronics that we take for granted today. As I reflect on my last few weeks here as an undergraduate, I hope that more students will be able to find that sense of amazement as well. Contact Arnav Mariwala at arnavm@stanford.edu.
“Your philosophers were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn’t even stop to see if they could.” By Nick Pether
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n the original “Jurassic Park” movie, Jeff Goldblum’s character Ian admonishes the park’s owner, John Hammond, “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” It’s a not-entirely-subtle appropriation of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a parable about science and technology being pursued recklessly by a naive scientific genius who hadn’t properly considered the moral implications of his work, with dire consequences for all. In this version, creating a bunch of dinosaurs predictably results in the dinosaurs eating everyone. As I said, it’s not a subtle movie. Flash forward to Stanford University, present day, and you will hear Ian’s concern echoed a lot. STEM majors must take a Technology in Society requirement class as well as numerous humanities requirements. I myself am part of EthiCS, a student group recently formed to promote discussions about responsibility in tech. Emma Pierson’s recent piece in WIRED, “Hey Computer Scientists, Stop Hating On The Humanities,” argues that an understanding of the humanities is necessary to help technologists understand the societal implications of what they do. For example, she describes one well-publicized instance where “an algorithm that fulfills basic statistical desiderata is also a lot more likely to rate black defendants as high-risk even when they will not go on to commit another crime”, arguing that Michelle Alexander’s works on mass incarceration might serve as a more useful guide to navigating this problem than an algorithms textbook. The gist of it is we need to ensure scientists and technologists have the values to avoid doing harm deliberately and the humility and understanding to avoid doing harm accidentally. STEM education alone doesn’t provide that. I want to make it absolutely clear that I am on board with this sentiment. Technological prowess is not the same as wisdom, and I think people building potentially world-changing technologies without a sophisticated grounding in ethical theory or an ability to anticipate and reason about the consequences of technological change is terrifying. I agree that the humanities can help provide this, by informing people’s values and worldview and better allowing scientists and technologists to empathize with people their work might affect. I still feel the need to echo Amy Shen of the Stanford Review in saying that this sort of thing needs to cut both ways if those who study the humanities are to fulfill their duty of helping humanity navigate the many thorny ethical dilemmas ahead. First, I think it is the duty of academics and philosophers to figure out what really matters and what we ought to care about. But even some of the most fundamental ethical questions cannot be answered without answering scientific questions first. Take, for instance, the question of who gets to be counted as a person and therefore included in our circle of compassion. Modern neuroscience has uprooted Cartesian Dualism, the notion that the mind is independent of the physical brain, as the dominant theory of how consciousness works. This has lent support to the belief that nonhuman animals are conscious, and that their thrashing around in pain is a product of actual suffering and not the meaningless reactions of an unfeeling and unthinking machine. This has some pretty profound and obvious implications regarding the moral acceptability of the ways we treat animals.
The moral status of infants, coma patients, insects and emulated people cannot be properly addressed without first furthering our understanding of cognition and neuroscience. Then there’s the responsibility of the humanities intelligentsia to anticipate the challenges ahead of society and convince us to act on them. Since I agree that many of the most important problems ahead of us will actually come from technology, we need our skeptical, naysaying journalists and public intellectuals to actually know what they’re talking about. You can’t assess the severity of threats from climate change, racist machine learning systems or bioengineered pandemics unless you really understand how climate change, machine learning and bioengineering work. You can’t effectively communicate these threats to the public. You certainly won’t be able to convince gung-ho Silicon Valley technologists that they ought to apply the brakes. Scientifically ignorant intellectuals run the risk of failing to spot important problems, which is a pity because they might be the only people who would take action on these problems had they seen them. Scientists and technologists have a vested interest in their work so can’t necessarily be trusted to stop when they ought to, even if they know they ought to. On the other hand, commenting on new discoveries and innovations without a proper understanding of the principles involved risks misinforming the public about what a discovery or innovation really entails. Journalists who don’t really know what they’re talking about risk downplaying the potential benefits of a new something, or creating unnecessary alarm about a threat that doesn’t exist in the first place. It’s all too easy to imagine wild sci-fi fear-mongering about the future implications of some technology leading to widespread hysteria or unnecessarily cumbersome regulation on beneficial fields and industries unlikely to produce anything dangerous. Finally, I’d like to point out that just as it’s incredibly annoying for humanities majors to be told their work basically amounts to pointless navel gazing, it is every bit as annoying for STEM people to read that the current state of their field basically amounts to Juicero (the stupid expensive juice machine all the cool kids are writing about). If every journalist writing about how Silicon Valley is “a stupid libertarian dystopia where investor-class vampires are the consumers and a regular person’s money is what they go shopping for” would please at least acknowledge that companies like Wave (helps immigrants send remittances to their families in East Africa), and Memphis Meats (creates cultured meats that have the potential to save millions of animals from a lifetime of torment every year) are also part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem they dismiss so haughtily. Overall, I agree that an either/or approach to science and the humanities is a mistake. STEM people who disregard the humanities are annoying, might not be that useful and may end up blowing us all up. Humanities majors who don’t pay more than superficial attention to what’s happening in STEM fields can be equally insufferable, and just as likely to waste everyone’s time or do something harmful or stupid. Holistic education and respect for all disciplines or bust! Contact Nick Pether at npether@stanford.edu. 9
AT STANFORD STACKS UP INCOME INEQUALITY HOW BY CLAIRE WANG
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t’s Admit Weekend. Campus has never looked more alive – White Plaza bustles with opportunity in every direction, pamphlets fly between hands and every office opens its doors in eager welcome to the newcomers. To prospective freshmen wandering hopelessly amidst the chaos, Stanford exists as a symbol of new hope and tangible success: the American dream finally realized. The University presents itself as a generous lending hand, lush with resources ready to embrace students from all walks of life and on every level of the socioeconomic spectrum. Stanford’s admissions website boasts a $22.4 billion endowment to “[provide] an enduring source of financial support for fulfillment of the university’s mission of teaching, learning, and research.” Elsewhere, the words “DIVERSITY” and “OUTREACH” jump off the page. However, recently released data from studies by economics professor Raj Chetty and his colleagues stands to challenge this rosy im10
age. Their research shows that at 38 colleges in America, including five Ivy League schools, the number of students whose parents belong to the top 1 percent of the income distribution surpasses the number whose parents fall within the entire bottom 60 percent. In other words, more students come from households with incomes exceeding $630,000 per year than come from households earning below $65,000. At Stanford, the numbers are not much better: As of 2013, more students come from the top 1 percent than the bottom 50 percent of the income scale. This statistic is true for the so-called Ivy-Plus colleges in general, which include the eight Ivy League schools as well as Stanford, University of Chicago, MIT and Duke. Amid a host of efforts to make Stanford more socioeconomically inclusive, why does the University’s student body remain so dramatically skewed toward the rich? Despite the expansion of financial aid in recent years, as well as reports of increases in students represented in the
lower income quartiles, the lines tracing change in Stanford’s socioeconomic makeup remain remarkably flat. Ultimately, these trends have major implications for promoting social and economic mobility. The data The Equality of Opportunity Project – pioneered by Chetty and colleagues from Brown University, UC Berkeley and the U.S. Treasury – is a collection of studies using big data to understand the relationships between educational opportunity and social mobility. Together, these researchers linked anonymized tax returns to the attendance records of over 30 million college students at nearly every college in the U.S. between 1999 and 2013. They then used this administrative data to develop publicly available “mobility report cards” that provide statistics correlating students’ earnings in their early thirties to their parents’ incomes for each college. The results Chetty and his collaborators found — recently publicized in a widely-read
article in The New York Times — were striking. The data calls into question the role that institutions of higher education play in fostering both upward income mobility and interaction between students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. “Only 3.8% of students come from the bottom 20% of the income distribution at IvyPlus Colleges,” the study states. “As a result, children from families in the top 1% are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college compared to children from families in the bottom 20%.” Across all colleges, this trend of income segregation parallels the income segregation across neighborhoods in the typical U.S. city. Robert Fluegge, a predoctoral research fellow involved with Chetty’s work at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), said he was shocked when he first saw the numbers on college socioeconomic diversity. “It’s not just Stanford,” he said. “I think it’s valuable to put numbers on problems like this because it galvanizes people; it gives them a starting point to get something done about it.” Despite the initial income gap between students from high- and low-income backgrounds, Chetty’s research found that students from these backgrounds have remarkably similar earnings outcomes at any given college. So it’s not a mere matter of preparedness, as it seems low-income students are more than capable of filling any initial achievement gaps between them and their higher-income peers: The barriers that prevent low-income students from attending elite universities are more complex. In the United States as a whole, a strong inequality of future earnings persists between students of different backgrounds: Children from high-income families tend to land 30 percentiles higher in the income distribution than peers from the lowest-income families in adulthood. But research indicates that when considering the student pool from any given elite college, this gap shortens to only 7.2 percentiles, a figure 76 percent smaller than is seen nationally. This trend holds true at Stanford as well. Despite large disparities in the number of students from the highest and lowest quartiles of the income scale, there is little difference among income outcomes. Chetty’s research also makes a distinction between universities that foster upper-tail mobility, which sends students to the top 1 percent of the earning distribution, and normal mobility, which sends students to the top 20 percent. Mid-tier public schools with high access to low-income students, such as the City University of New York, offer the highest normal mobility rates – much higher than that of Ivy-Plus colleges like Stanford.
PARENT INCOME DISTRIBUTION AT STANFORD (out of 100 students) TOP 1%
TOP 20%
TOP 40%
TOP 60%
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Schools that accomplish the highest rates of upper-tail mobility, on the other hand, are generally elite Ivy-Plus colleges with minimal access to low-income students. “We definitely don’t want to tell Stanford or other institutions what to do, but we think our data suggest [elite schools] could be doing more to admit more poor students,” Fluegge said. “We can’t say that for certain without the admissions data, but the things that we’ve seen … suggest that students at Stanford that are low-income tend to do basically as well as students that are high-income.” Chetty and his colleagues’ work also reveals that, while the number of low-income students attending college rose quickly during the 2000s, the number of students from bottom-quintile families at four-year colleges and selective schools did not experience significant change. Stanford’s percentage of bottomquintile families was more or less stagnant at below 5 percent throughout the first decade of the 2000s. Given Chetty’s data, what’s to explain the lack of socioeconomic diversity among Stanford’s student body? Barriers to diversity One of the major problems Stanford faces in attracting low-income students is that outreach, while extensive, still struggles to connect competitive students with the University. “Although we tried to increase financial aid, we also have to work very hard to get the message out to low-income students that those resources are available,” said Dereca Blackmon ’91, associate dean and director of Stanford’s Diversity and First-Gen (DGen) Office. Dean Richard Shaw echoed her sentiment and noted that only 47 percent of Stanford students receive need-based financial aid. “The reality is there are competitive kids out there from all walks of life, all backgrounds, that will be uber-competitive,” he said. “And in some cases, they don’t apply. … They just [don’t] realize they [can] look outside their own regions or neighborhoods.” Indeed, there is research being done outside of Chetty’s group that explores why low-income, high-achieving students do not apply to selective colleges at the same rates as wealthier peers that are similarly high-achieving as measured by test scores. Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences Caroline Hoxby, for example, has shown that these highperforming students tend to apply as though they were low-achieving, low-income students. This may be due in part to a lack of advising and college counseling resources at high schools in more low-income areas, Fluegge posited. “There are a lot of things that are keeping students from applying … [whether or not there 11
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TRENDS IN LOW-INCOME ACCESS AT STANFORD AND HARVARD 40 (%)
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exists] emphasis on higher education … at your school: how many students from your school go to a [place] like Stanford versus going into the workforce or community college, whether you have mentorship from your teachers or counselors and how well they support you,” said Anakaren Cervantes ’17, a student staffer at the DGen Office who works in admissions as a diversity outreach associate. “If you don’t have that and you don’t have resources outside of school, then it’s a lot harder for you.” Less access to resources may starkly influence low-income students’ understanding of which colleges are the best academic and financial choices. Interestingly enough, students from poor families often end up spending more to go to worse colleges, remarked Fluegge. “[At] colleges like Stanford [and] Harvard … many of these students would be eligible for a 12
Top Quintile 5th Quintile
30
2011
full ride,” he said. “And that is not the case at the schools they tend to go to.” Once at Stanford, though, low-income students face an additional set of challenges as they navigate financial aid and unanticipated expenses. As Angela Umeh ’19 noted, understanding how financial contributions and aid actually work can be a source of endless confusion and frustration. “There was never a moment that someone came through and talked to me about my financial aid package,” Umeh said. “Stanford still makes you pay a student contribution… that I didn’t know I would owe. The financial aid office staff tries to be helpful, but… they don’t always have the solution to your problem, and at best they can delay the problem.” Moreover, in a survey of the entire Class of 2016 conducted by the DGen Office, 50 percent of students who responded reported that
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Percentage of students from this income bracket Percentage of students from this income bracket who reach top fifth
they send money home. The Office continues to work with students to identify other potentially hidden financial obligations, such as ensuring food security during spring break, finding places to stay during winter break and summer and covering unanticipated medical expenses. “Random expenses hit really hard,” Umeh added. “[I] accidentally booked the wrong tickets home, [but] school keeps going on.” What’s being done Ultimately, it is clear the University has a duty to help mitigate broader systemic issues at play in financial inequality, but the solution is by no means one-shot. And Stanford is working to increase the socioeconomic diversity of its campus. According to Dean Shaw, the prospective Class of 2021 contains Stanford’s highest per-
Infographics by NA HE JEON/The Stanford Daily
0
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Top 1% Top Quintile 2nd Quintile 3rd Quintile 4th Quintile Bottom Quintile
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MIT Columbia Cornell Caltech Chicago Yale Stanford U Penn Duke Harvard Brown Dartmouth Princeton
PERCENTAGE OF STANFORD STUDENTS WHO REACH THE TOP QUINTILE (>$60K AT AGE 34) PER PARENT INCOME QUINTILE
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DISTRIBUTION OF PARENT INCOMES AT IVY PLUS COLLEGES
centage of admissions offers to first-generation and low-income students to date. 2015 saw an expansion of the financial aid program: Parents with annual incomes below $125,000 are now expected to provide zero contribution toward tuition, and parents with incomes below $65,000 are expected to provide zero contribution toward tuition, room or board. Previously, those aid cutoffs were $100,000 and $60,000 respectively. “I think financial aid has made a huge difference, and in fact, we’ve seen some nice increases in students represented in the lower income quartiles and particularly this year,” Shaw said, though he could not specify distributions. However, some argue Stanford must do more to grow its financial aid. Unlike some peer schools such as Harvard and Princeton, Stanford still does not extend its need-blind admissions policy to international applicants. Shaw said that need-blind international admissions are “still very much on [Stanford’s] agenda” but that budgetary constraints following 2008’s economic downturn set it back as a priority. With an endowment of over $20 billion, expanding need-blind admissions to all prospective students might seem a no-brainer. But according to Shaw, the necessary funds are still lacking. However, he said, Stanford has been increasing the amount of aid it gives students from abroad. Need-blind policies aside, the latest increases in financial aid may not make much of an impact on students from the poorest families, who were likely already covered with near-full aid. To combat persistent underrepresentation of low-income students, Stanford will need to pursue other strategies. Stanford recently joined the American Talent Initiative, a consortium of 68 universities with a commitment to expanding college access to 50,000 additional low-income students within the next decade. Every summer, Stanford invites and covers the cost of travel for 30 to 50 high school counselors from public high schools and community-based organizations in low-income communities to help them learn to advise their students to apply to places like Stanford. Last summer, the University also launched the Coalition Application, an alternate online college application established by a group of universities with a commitment to helping high school students acquire information and plan for application to selective colleges. A number of initiatives are also in place to help low-income students overcome socioeconomic barriers once on campus: The Leland Scholars Program, for example, exists as a summer bridge program that allows students to get an academic head start by taking courses dur-
ing the summer before their freshman year — as well as by exposing them to faculty members who seek to increase students’ sense of belonging at Stanford. Meanwhile, at New Student Orientation, the DGen Office hosts luncheons and outreach events for parents and students to provide information about the resources and support systems provided at Stanford. During the school year, the University also provides a generous Opportunity Fund to help students overcome financial challenges such as paying to fix a broken computer or bicycle, traveling to attend conferences, buying textbooks and meeting unforeseen medical expenses. Furthermore, Student Financial Services hosts financial literacy workshops on campus to help first-generation and low-income students navigate loans, taxes and more. Umeh applied to Stanford through the national QuestBridge program and said that Stanford’s participation in the initiative strikes her as a notable positive step toward including low-income students. QuestBridge links high-achieving, low-income high school students with elite schools through a matching system. Participants in the program include six Ivy League schools; Harvard is absent from the list. In terms of her dorm experience, Umeh noted that accessing financial aid has never presented an issue and that the First Generation and/or Low Income Partnership (FLIP) program also provides useful alternatives to University programs, helping out with, for example, an emergency grant for a sudden flight home. “As a whole institution compared to other elite schools, Stanford does do a pretty good job trying to help the low-income community and be aware,” Umeh said. “It’s definitely doing a lot, and I don’t want to disregard that — but on a personal level, you do notice where the gaps are, and talking about that can help Stanford be aware of it. … [I]t’s kind of hard when you’re getting so much money from a school to be like, ‘Actually, do you have more?’ You don’t want to be ungrateful, but honestly, sometimes you do need more resources — or at least recognition that it’s hard.” A complex problem The challenges faced by low-income students are more than just economic; they’re also psychological. Blackmon cited research by Associate Professor of Psychology Greg Walton describing the “stereotype threat” that exists for both low-income and high-income students, who feel at risk of personally fulfilling negative stereotypes about their broader groups. “There is this image of [Stanford] in terms of being high-income that is intimidating for low-income and/or first-generation stu-
dents,” she said. “Folks come in wondering [if] everything from where they buy their clothes to what they can afford to eat is going to impact their ability to have a sense of belonging here.” In a social setting, income inequality can create stress for low-income students as they struggle to decide whether or not they can convey to their higher-income peers that they cannot afford certain luxuries such as eating out, joining organizations with fees or participating in extracurricular activities with high costs. Such stress extends into the classroom, too: For example, Blackmon cited an assignment in which a professor asked students to write about their last vacation. “If you’re high income, then that’s something you often can readily think about, whereas if you’re low-income, it might not be,” she said. She said professors sometimes make outright assumptions about whether or not their students relate to being low-income, though a significant percentage of students do. Umeh said that some professors make more of an effort than others to provide cheap textbook options, but she added that it’s difficult to predict how sensitive professors will be towards low-income students’ circumstances. “Professors can go either way – some are more aware than others,” Umeh said. “You never know if you can tell a professor, ‘I can’t afford this.’” Still, she stressed that that students from high-earning families ought not to receive stigma for the way they grew up. From pre-admission through their time at the University, students ask themselves, “Will I be able to afford Stanford?” And “afford,” these days, is a loaded word – not just for Stanford. There is a sociological, psychological, socioeconomically untenable cost to the effects of an institutional setting in which such striking economic disparity exists within the student body. “Income mobility for low-income [college] students is parallel to [that of] middle-income and high-income students,” Blackmon said. “[They are all] equally likely to end up in the top 1 percent. Is Stanford’s primary objective to make students high-income? No. But if we’re going to challenge economic disparity, don’t they have to have the economic mobility to do that?” Undeniably, institutions of higher education are important engines for economic mobility. And while the goals of the University are certainly broader than fattening the wallets of its students in the future, the greater challenge remains: What is the University’s obligation to affect inequality within itself, and what does it still owe to its students in this regard? Contact Claire Wang at clwang32@stanford.edu. 13
I The
Pre Med Drop Out BY VIVIAN LAM |
f you complain about chemistry, major in biology or human biology, petition for 22 units twice a year, get aneurysms thinking about our disintegrating healthcare system and/or wear strangely wet scrubs to class, you’ll inevitably be asked: “Are you pre-med?” Depending on how many years you’ve been at the grind, your affirmative will either be enthusiastic, despairing (because they’ve discovered your deepest darkest secret and will judge you to be a soulless monster with a really good GPA) or nonchalant (because you’re totally not like all those other high-strung pre-meds, because you’re, like, just so chill). But there’s also the confessional “I used to be pre-med, but…” Medical professionals, students and laypeople alike agree that the path to becoming a doctor is long and hard. They all tell you to think hard and think twice about whether all these sacrifices will be worth it, and once you’ve done that — think again. And one of the biggest hurdles is getting into medical school in the first place. Everyone has their reasons for dropping out of the pre-med track. In the wake of the many tears, regrets and headshakes of disappointment from every entity in the cosmos and your mom that ensue from that decision, we need to take a harder look at why pre-med is so notoriously difficult. What lies behind that “but?” “A competent knowledge of chemistry, biology and physics” Stanford advises its pre-medical students to take “2 years chemistry with lab, 1 year biology with lab,” and “1 year physics with lab.” They note that “some medical schools may require math and English and some of the sciences require math as a prerequisite.” The addition of a behavioral science component to the MCAT (Medical College Admissions Test) in 2015 encourages students to take an additional course in sociology or psychology. This translates to six or seven chemistry courses, five biology courses, three physics classes, two writing classes, and two to four math classes (including statistics), totaling from 18 to 21 pre-med courses, or 115 to 130 units. You can’t major in pre-med, as they say, but with that many units, you could conceivably get degrees in Human Biology (min. 81 units) or Biology (86102) with Japanese (min. 45), two humanities degrees (Comparative Literature min. 65, and History 63-74), or one in Computer Science (91106) with a minor to spare. These requirements were codified by the “Flexner Report,” an 846-page study of the state of medical education in the U.S. and Canada published in 1910 by physician Abraham Flexner through the Carnegie Foundation. Flexner’s response to the question of “how much education or intelligence it requires to establish a reasonable
presumption of fitness to undertake the study of medicine under present circumstances” (23) was a “competent knowledge of chemistry, biology, and physics” (25). In regards to chemistry, in particular, Harvard instructor in anatomy Frederick S. Hammett gave a speech to the American Chemistry Society in 1917 about the need to instill robust chemical knowledge in pre-medical students. “The true physician must be a true diagnostician. He can not [sic] be a diagnostician if he lacks power of observation and ability to carry on deductive reasoning. Where better can he gain this fundamental training than in chemistry?” Students are not supposed to be made chemists, per se, but they should be able to have the diagnostic capacity and attention to detail that intense training in chemistry provides. Which sounds reasonable. But as Donald Barr, M.D., professor of pediatrics and Human Biology at Stanford, notes in his book “Questioning the Pre-Medical Paradigm,” these requirements were neither new nor scientifically determined. Regardless, it did have the effect of establishing the notion that “the extent to which a premedical student has succeeded in studying the sciences as an undergraduate is a reflection of the student’s inherent intellectual ability” and can gauge their future success as a physician. Who leaves the track: Race and gender Of course, we want doctors who know their science and medicine, who know how to think critically and analytically, who know how to work long hours under pressure. But do undergraduate science scores truly reflect a student’s capacity to be a good physician? In our interview, Barr described how science grades predict performance in the three national licensure examinations (USMLES) interspersed between med school and residency. According to Barr, “Your MCAT science scores and your undergraduate science grades predict your grades in the first two years of science classes in medical school, but not your clinical skills.” MCAT verbal scores and non-cognitive characteristics are better predictors of how well you do in ward rounds. In addition, undergraduate science grades are inversely correlated with empathy scores. “For decades, medical schools have been using science grades to ‘weed out’ weak students when in fact, who they’re weeding out are the people with the best interpersonal skills, which are the best predictors of clinical skills down the road,” said Barr. Barr was inspired to investigate pre-med attrition when he heard “I used to be pre-med, but…” coming more from women and racial or ethnic groups that are underrepresented in medicine (URM) among his sophomore and junior advisees. So he conducted a study following freshman who indicated an interest
in pre-med upon entering Stanford. An average of 363 freshmen (~22 percent of the entering class) expressed an interest in pre-med. Of these, an average of 108 (~30 percent) were URM. Over the same time period, an average of 294 Stanford students applied to at least one medical school, 50 of whom were URM. He found that attrition disproportionately impacted URM and female pre-med students. Almost 50 percent of URM students dropped out of pre-med, compared to 17 percent of nonURM students. Another study surveying UC Berkeley students found similar results. Many of these students cited chemistry as a deciding factor to drop out of the track. “Students hear that if you can’t do well in chemistry, you’re not going to get into medical school. And that was actually coming from the pre-med advising office,” said Barr. “Medical schools have historically used science grades as a marker of how qualified you are — and that’s problematic.” But why is chemistry so notoriously the greatest drop-off point for pre-meds? And why does it disproportionately affect URM and female students? Chemistry: The “weeding out” course For many students, the word “chemistry” is synonymous with pre-med (and general frosh) misery. In a survey I sent to various email lists at Stanford to explore pre-med attrition, almost all 108 undergraduates and recent graduates cited dissatisfaction with the pre-med courses as the reason why they either considered or did drop out of the pre-med track. Of these students, the large majority explicitly cite the chemistry requirements as the main reason why they dropped out. “Chemistry is important because it shows rigor,” said Skylar Cohen ‘17, a senior co-terming in communications. “But if you put that in front of students without showing them the payoff, it’s an incredibly demoralizing environment.” At the time of our interview, Anthony Milki ’17, a pre-med who wrote about his frustrations on being pre-med in the Stanford Arts Review, had just taken the Chem 141 final. “It really felt like I completely wasted my time studying. … like I could have not studied and done just as poorly,” said Milki. “I get that they want a grade distribution, but at what cost?” Chemistry professors Charlie Cox, Ph.D., Justin Du Bois, Ph.D., and Jennifer SchwartzPoehlmann, Ph.D., lecturers in the introductory chemistry series, are very aware that students consider their courses as something that “weeds out” pre-meds. “It’s so sad that we have legions of people who think chemistry is the worst subject they have ever studied,” said Du Bois. “We’re deeply committed to changing these attitudes, but these are hard and entrenched. … We’re really trying to get this broader community to see just
how empowering understanding the language of chemistry can be.” Contrary to the aura of failure that surrounds chemistry, they say, the numbers show otherwise. “What always confuses us when we hear this from students is that no one failed 141 last quarter, less than 2 percent fail in the general chemistry series, and most of those cases are due to a significant outside event beyond their control,” said Schwartz. “Our mission is to help people learn. There is no benefit to us to weeding people out.” In addition, exams are “extremely well-vetted” and take at least 25 hours to make. “We run every exam between three to five TAs, and run it through the rigor before you even see it,” said Schwartz. Nor do the chemistry courses follow a true grading curve. But if they aren’t “out to get you,” why does chemistry consistently evoke images of undue suffering, futility and tears? One big reason is that chemistry is one of the first college-level science courses students take — and the transition can be hard. “If it were biology, there would probably be a lot of hard decisions made in there too,” said Schwartz. “The challenge is that compared to high school science, college is a very different ask of students. And it’s tough for people to change.” “If you look at your average organic chemistry problem, it’s all about diagnosing the problem and ruling things out. That’s how medicine is practiced,” said Du Bois. “We try very hard to structure our classes and our problems to enforce this kind of problem-solving skill. But it’s not easy — most kids come out of high school and think science is about sticking numbers into an equation and getting a black and white answer.” Cox makes a distinction between exercise and problems. “In high school we’re used to doing exercises in which the numbers are changed. You work problems over and over, learn the answer, and it becomes an exercise. You can’t memorize organic chemistry.” They emphasize that there are many places to turn for help. “The department has collectively spent a ton of resources on service courses because we know that we’re servicing such a broad population,” said Schwartz. Office hours are run almost every day of the week, alongside extra review sessions, practice exams, online resources, VPTL tutoring and academic skills development. For students coming in with little to no background in science, Schwartz and Cox jointly teach in the Leland Scholars Program, a summer transitional program designed to help incoming freshman who are first-generation or from under-resourced schools. “The program tries to look holistically at the student and address all the different challenges. We want to make sure that they get comfortable with the campus and the resources here. They take two exams in the [Braun] lecture hall here so they feel more
acclimated when they walk in the first day.” Schwartz also teaches the companion courses, “Problem Solving in Science,” that run parallel to Chem 31A/B and 33. Here, instructors teach study skills and group problem solving, ensuring that students practice chemistry from Monday through Friday. “It’s a partnership,” said Du Bois. “It’s about trying to encourage students to, like any language, practice a little bit every day.” Compounding the diversity of student science background is the diversity of academic interests among students in introductory chemistry courses. “We’re actually a very service-oriented department,” said Du Bois. “The students we teach are not interested in majoring in the subject but need to have some kind of background and education in chemistry.” An average introductory chemistry course is populated not just by students in the life sciences but also in engineering, earth systems, English and, believe it or not, some students there just for fun. The problem that comes with that diversity is how to service everyone well when everyone has different needs. The Chem 141/143 series “The Chemical Principles of Life” launched just this year in response to the disparity of student chemical and biological backgrounds in the biochemistry series Chem 171/181. “We were not really servicing the needs of the students as well as we could have because there was really a split in the population of the students in the class,” said Du Bois. In their third iteration of the series, they divided the class so students with strong chemistry backgrounds would go into a more chemistry-oriented 171/181, and students with strong biology backgrounds towards the cell biology-oriented 141/143. They emphasize that they do listen and care about teaching and about their students. They don’t assign junior faculty to teach introductory chemistry courses, and they do frequent small group evaluations to modify courses in real time. “Just as your studying habits evolve, so do our teaching habits,” said Schwartz. “I can’t tell you how much pleasure I get out of seeing a student who walks into Chem 35 knowing that it will be a horrific experience, and this is the class that will make or break their life in medicine. And by the end of the 10 weeks, they’re saying ‘This wasn’t so bad,’ or ‘That didn’t suck,’” said Du Bois. “We’re passionate about chemistry and we’re enthusiastic about teaching chemistry,” said Cox. “That’s our ultimate goal.” It’s clear that, though there are many resources available and changes are ever in the works, there are many students who are still struggling and slip through the cracks. Chemistry remains one of the biggest reasons why students drop out of pre-med. Until medical schools stop requiring chemistry prerequisites, students will need to not just study hard, but study well. 15
Skipping the requirements: Medical school by sophomore year There is a workaround the pre-medical requirements, however. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai’s FlexMed Program is the first early admission program in the country. Students apply during the sophomore year, and with acceptance are “free to pursue [their] studies unencumbered by the traditional sciences requirements and the MCAT.” In fact, they explicitly state that students “will not be permitted to take the MCAT.” Sounds like a dream come true, right? David Muller, the dean for medical education at Mount Sinai, states that “FlexMed is all about flexibility in your education and the opportunity to pursue what you love to learn. It allows talented students with lots of initiative to ‘flex’ their intellectual, creative, humanistic, and scientific muscles during college.” Students are still required to take some of the traditional premed requirements before matriculation, though most are reduced by one semester to a year. Natty Jumreornvong ’17, a senior in Human Biology and incoming FlexMed student, felt that pre-med requirements were “restrictive of [her] valuable time at Stanford.” She stumbled upon the program in searching for ways to free up space to pursue her interests and advance her career. “Honestly, I just Googled ‘medical school without organic chemistry’!” she said. “I was working on an electronic health records company at that time serving 5000 patients with chronic disabilities and spinal cord injuries in rural Thailand. I didn’t have the time or energy to be taking all the pre-med classes. I wanted to take classes that would be helpful for my venture.” Jumreornvong also found FlexMed to be the best avenue into medical school for her as an international student. “I have a lot of friends who … are taking a gap year or two to finish up their pre-med requirements and take the MCAT. Taking gap years are unfortunately not the best option for international students who are here on a student visa. As an international student, pre-med advisors tried to steer me away from applying to medical schools because they said it is very competitive. Some undergrad websites were even upfront about it,” she said. “I feel like if I wasn’t accepted into FlexMed, I would have given up on pre-med.” Natty Jumreornvong ’17 is an incoming FlexMed student who will be entering the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the fall. Photos by DANNA GALLEGOS/The Stanford Daily 16
Donald and Vera Blinken, benefactors of the program, said,“Intellectual curiosity is as important as a stethoscope, and we’re pleased to support young people who are interested in the world and have broadened their horizons through the study of literature, history, and philosophy. It gives these students a real edge in their medical careers.” And for the most part, these students do just as well as their counterparts who took the traditional route. But why is such “intellectual curiosity” made available only when pre-medical requirements are taken out of the picture? If the humanities are supposed to provide a “real edge” to medical careers, why aren’t they requirements? And what about everybody else? The pre-med Marshmallow Test There are many implicit hoops lining the way to medical school, couched in the maxim of “Do what you love the most and do it well!” Floating in the air are “suggested”checkboxes that include an A-average science and overall GPA (none of which may come from a community college), being in the 90th percentile in MCAT score, research experience, a running list of first-author publications, clinical volunteer experiences, extensive shadowing, leadership roles and three to five glowing letters of recommendation. Go to any “What are my chances?” section on an online pre-medical forum and you’ll see these components ranked, bargained over and passive-aggressively displayed like MMORPG stats. In spite of all this, there is still the very real possibility of rejection from every med school you spent $160 plus $38/school (not including the $0-150 secondary fees, and the $310 MCAT registration fee — of note, the AAMC recommends that you “maintain strong credit as you begin the medical school application process”) to apply for. There’s a lot of pressure to succeed — and for someone who has excelled enough to get into Stanford, stepping out of this endurance race feels like you’re either giving up or being lazy. But staying on pace often comes at the expense of opportunities for growth and development. “To do really well in these classes, you have to give up certain activities and attitudes that would make you a better physician down the line,” said Milki. “You have to probably not read books outside of class, where you learn from people who care. You have to give up being with your friends, though it’s important to have a support group.” And often, the time and effort required to both stay afloat in pre-medical courses and not fall behind on your resume checklist can be all-consuming. Damien Sagastume ’17, who dropped pre-med to pursue teaching, was similarly frustrated by how pre-med stifles authentic passion and growth. “I feel like it’s a very prescriptive thing —they’ll tell you to be creative, but I feel like a lot of pre-meds do things
because they feel like it’s what medical schools want to see,” he said. Jason Li ’18, who took a break from pre-med his sophomore year, often found the requirements as a hindrance to his work in social justice. “The classes can feel really SELECT stifling for what I want FROM A SU to do,” he said. “They’re STANFORD P not necessarily the most relevant to what I want to (108 respo pursue in community and public health … and they aren’t totally relevant to my major,” he said. For Cohen, dropping out of pre-med gave him the mental space to more fully engage “As a premed student in with his time at Stanford. Bay Area...Our journeys a
we have reached our becoming medical profes premeds come much late do for students in tech, applauded for our ability t the pursuit of someth pressured to drop the pr rewards in tech. I believe fields should collaborat medicine together have alleviate huma
“I wish we could all be a little more chill (in terms of grades) and that there wasn't as much pressure to do a million different activities. It leaves very little time for self-care or hanging out with friends. There's also just a pervading sentiment of anxiety that accompanies every pre-med related activity that makes them hard to enjoy.”
“Not having to imagine med school admissions boards looking at my transcripts has made me enjoy Stanford rather than considering it as some brutal training ground,” he said. Gigi Nwagbo ’18, co-president of SWIM, said she reconsiders being pre-med every quarter. “I’m always thinking ‘Do I really want to do this’? ‘What’s my motivation’? ‘Why am I into this’?” she said. “Every pre-med class I have to take that’s a little extra and not required for [my major], that’s just taking up a lot of your time, that makes you skip out on your friends … You wonder why you’re doing it.” As one survey respondent put it, pre-med necessitates a “suffer for the future” mentality, which isn’t necessarily a healthy habit. Nwagbo points to the allure of the faster, more lucrative pathways that surround us. “If you took CS, you get instant gratification,” she said. “To be a surgeon, it will take at least 10 more years of school.” In a sense, being a pre-medical student is much like one big Marshmallow Test on steroids. But in spite of the long wait, and the doubts and setbacks that arise, many hold onto that end goal.
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ondents) “The competition. In most cases I think the desire to outperform classmates is healthy (I mean that's what everyone wants to do in all their classes) but this is definitely more exaggerated in the premed track. It feels a bit like high school all over, building a resume to move on to the next step. I think that is what I dislike the most.”
MAJORS Undeclared TAPS Symbolic Systems Public Policy Public Health Science Psychology Mechanical Engineering Math & Computer Science Math Cellular and Biomolecular Engineering Human Biology History Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies English
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IF YOU COULD CHANGE ANYTHING ABOUT THE PRE-MED TRACK OR ITS CULTURE, WHAT WOULD THAT BE? “It is almost too cutthroat. There is a huge focus on getting good grades and beating out competitors. In reality, medicine is all about being able to collaborate effectively with others. Grades don't even matter that much after medical school. As a practicing physician, you aren't going to have to complete a calculus problem. But you will have to use the same problem-solving skills when diagnosing a patient.”
“People place too much emphasis on how important it is to do well in all things -- in all the premed classes, in getting leadership positions in clinic, etc. It took me some time to realize that I don't need to pressure myself to get perfect grades in all of my premed classes in order to be competitive.”
Electrical Engineering Economics Earth Systems Computer Science Communications Classics Civil Engineering Chemistry and Biology Chemical Engineering Biomechanical Engineering Biomedical Computation Biology
JANET LIU/The Stanford Daily
“The internal feeling that ‘I should have done more today, someone did more than I did today’; every single day, although you worked 16 hours non stop that day. We are future doctors. We should be trained how to be self-confident in challenging situations, brave, rational and functional. The pre med culture as it is today teaches and conditions us to do the opposite. This culture made most of my time in Stanford unbearable.”
“I question it every day,” said Nwagbo, “but you find your reasons.” Stanford pre-med culture: Collaboration, fear and a dash of anxiety The stereotypical Pre-Med™ student, according to popular opinion, is someone who is mercenary in their extracurriculars and robotic in their emotional valence. They neurotically monitor their GPAs and are allergic to anything that won’t be on the test. They are “cutthroat,” in that they might very well literally cut the throats of their fellow cutthroat peers to have one less promising Jason Li ’18 felt that premedical requirements stifled his ability to pursue other interests, like social justice work.
applicant to worry about. We hear stories about pre-meds who would give the wrong answers to someone asking for help, kick away another student’s dropped eraser during exams, sabotage another student’s lab results, or slash the tires of a commuting student so they wouldn’t skew the curve. These are just stories. But what makes these stories more horrifying is that we wouldn’t be surprised if they were actually true. Luckily, based on the aforementioned survey and qualitative interviews, there is a general agreement that Stanford’s pre-med culture is not as cutthroat as other schools. In fact, there are many students who view Stanford’s premed culture to be collaborative. Nwagbo found that “people don’t see each other as competition — more as colleagues.” Michelle Chin ’17, copresident of SWIM with Nwagbo, has also found that the right peer support can make for a generally positive pre-med experience, even with
the intensity. “We really care about our education because we want to be good doctors, but we support each other as well. And that’s something that I’m very grateful for. I made a lot of close friends from just doing p-sets and studying together.” And there are a number of pre-medical student groups that aim to provide resources and support for students from a variety of backgrounds. These include SWIM, the Stanford Pre-Medical Association (SPA), the Asian Pacific American Medical Association (APAMSA), Chicanos/ Latinos in Health Education (CHE), the Stanford Black Pre-Medical Organization (SBPO), and Michelle Chin ’17 is the co-president of Stanford Women in Medicine (SWIM), and has found valuable friendships through pre-med classes and clubs.
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Natives in Medicine (NIM), among other health and medicine-related groups. It helps to see people who are like you who face similar challenges as you all go forward. But there is also a large contingent of students who feel that the pre-med culture at Stanford is far too competitive. Milki finds the pre-med environment toxic. “Stanford inherently breeds this competitive feeling that is really unhealthy,” he said. “It necessarily means I want other people to do badly so I can do well because of the curve, and it’s just really antithetical to how doctors should be. … I can’t help but feel like ‘I hope people bomb this test so I can do well.’ There is definitely a top-to-bottom system that forces you to be really scared. And when you’re scared, you’re irrational, and you start hating other people and being selfish.” His experiences made him cognizant of an implicit hostility and self-destruction that the pre-med track can create for students. “I’ve just seen so many people crying after exams in chem. … There’s a degree of stress where you start to make bad decisions and doing things that are not good for yourself. A lot of these classes really breed that,” he said. “I’m not really getting much out of it. I’m not learning well or doing well. It’s frustrating to feel stupid — and it’s frustrating to have hard work not pay off.” Of course, we care about grades. It’s very likely that many of us had no idea you could get something less than an “A” on your transcript. But in many respects, the pre-med gauntlet is a place where intellectual vitality atrophies. As one survey respondent put it, “I wish that pre-meds … would focus more on their actual passion towards their classes and studies, rather than being so grade- and outcome-focused. … I wish pre-meds would spend more time asking probing, interesting questions and not simply take the information at hand as fact. In a chemistry class, for example, I wish pre-meds would have more respect for another student who asks genuinely interesting questions, even if at the expense of review session time.” Though pre-meds at Stanford might not outright sabotage each other, there is a running anxiety that begins from the first bad test grade in chemistry to med school admission results. And sometimes ambition begins to look hostile. The paradox is that while we all agree that we want well-rounded, mentally stable and compassionate doctors, the lengthy gauntlet of requirements does very little to support students in those capacities. How many of those doctors have we lost in pre-med, in medical school, in residency? The prestige factor Most people who have an interest in going into medicine typically point to their desire to help people. In the aforementioned survey of 108 current Stanford undergraduate and recent graduates in 2017, almost all respondents cite a 18
desire to provide service and care. Many cite a general interest in biology and science or being inspired and encouraged by a family member who is a physician. As one respondent put it, “It felt so admirable of a career to be able to spend my life directly impacting the livelihoods of others. The humanity of the role resonated with my aspirations to change the world for the better.” Damien Sagastume ’17 is pursuing education instead of medicine and struggled with telling his parents about his career change.
But if we all we want is to be able to help other people, why not become a teacher, a social worker or a policymaker? Why not go into public health or work in some NGO or nonprofit or for-profit-for-social-good? Of all the ways that we can help other people and “change the world for the better,” why does it have to be a profession with one of the longest training requirements, the most grueling hours, the highest burnout rates, and the highest risk of death by suicide? It could be that some people strongly desire direct patient interaction and care. But if that’s the case, then why not consider becoming a nurse practitioner or a physician’s assistant, where you’ll be able to do nearly just as much as the doctor with competitive pay, more face-to-face patient interaction, shorter training requirements, and greater leeway for a more hospitable lifestyle? In the same survey, a little less than half had considered health professions outside of medicine. When asked why, the majority cite lower salary and social status and less prestige and authority. And this is what underlies the look of confusion that many a well-meaning professor, parent or mentor, among others, will give you once you tell them. And it often becomes a dirty little secret. Sarah Harris ’09, nurse practitioner student at UCSF, found little support among her peers and mentors. “When I talked to my advisor about it, he straight up told me it would be a waste of my Stanford education to do anything but medical school.” Then it becomes a game of justification — a desire “to help people” is not enough for these professions, regardless of the magnitudes of impact they might have over your average doctor. Sagastume wrote about his decision to drop pre-med and pursue teaching in a Medium article called “Circular Dreams and Square Holes.” In the article, he contrasts telling his parents his decision to become a high school biology teacher to his experience of coming out — support vanishing in disbelief, and a hope that “This is probably just a phase.” In our interview, he spoke about how he was
inspired to go into education because of its long-term impact, and the mixed reception he received upon making that decision. “I was premed was because no one was going to second guess that. It’s a lucrative career that looks good on paper,” he said. “I’m a first-gen college student, and going to Stanford and being a doctor is like the next step up. … And to be a teacher, it’s like going a step down.” His parents have since grown more accepting of his decision. But they still have their own notions of what is “the best” for their son. “I’m considering going to Harvard because they have a really good teacher education program. … And they’re all ‘You should go there!’ They’re still caught up in this idea of prestige. … It’s frustrating because they’re still looking for that. But they understood that this was the best decision for myself, as much as they wished I’d be a doctor and have financial security.” It’s true that going to Stanford comes with the expectation of going on to do something that is either A) lucrative, B) prestigious, C) notable, or D) massively impactful, or a combination of the four. Careers that satisfy the above typically fall into the hallowed golden triad of doctor, engineer, lawyer (with the exception that you manage to land a page on Wikipedia, or get a spot in Forbes 30 Under 30 or TIME 100 — then anything is totally O.K.). Regardless of what we pursue, we must always be upward bound — to justify the sacrifices that were made to get here and to deserve the spot we earned in this rather fine institution. We can’t deny that these “step-down” professions are valuable. We’d still want only the best teachers for our children, and the best nurses for our patients. It shouldn’t be considered a “noble” sacrifice or a cop out to choose to pursue careers that are just as meaningful and critical as being a doctor. And if the only reason why you’re going into medicine over some other profession is because of the prestige and the salary, what are you going to say in your interview? The pre-med “canoe” Unlike a number of other pre-professions that are freeform enough to give you the opportunity to explore, the seemingly rigid structure of the pre-med track often generates a deep-set anxiety about “falling behind” or falling off the train altogether and getting left behind in the bushes. The track begins as soon as you check the box on your Stanford forms that you’re interested in medicine. You might be paired up with a premajor advisor who has some form of experience in the medical field. If not, you’ll soon meet with a pre-med advisor who will give you a sheet of paper mapping out the rest of your four years. By the end of your first year, you should be on your way to at least the second half of the chemistry series, with several hours of clinical experience and a few leadership and research assistant positions in your pocket, a summer gig
in healthcare, and, ideally, a budding spiritual romance with a faculty member you’ll ask to write a letter of recommendation three or four years down the line. This is what’s recommended by the Stanford Pre-Medical Association’s pre-med timeline in their unofficial handbook, and suggested by Undergraduate Advising and Research, the AAMC, the Princeton Review, and most colleges. It may or may not sound like a lot; it certainly encourages you to be proactive. But the problem of hopping on board so quickly, as we have seen, is quickly feeling like you’re scrambling, locked in, and unable to get out. Said one survey respondent, “It was difficult to take time to explore whether medicine is the right path for me because there were so many pre-med requirements that I felt if I did not take them right away, I would fall behind. As a result, I felt a little trapped and resentful.” Barr suggests changing the metaphor — from pre-med “track” to pre-med “canoe.” “The track will get you there — you just go straight. But,” he pointed to a map of the Central Valley. “Let’s say instead of boarding a train, you get on a canoe. You want to paddle up the San Joaquin River through the California Delta to get out to the bay. As we travel along the river, many watercourses diverge off into different paths. There are recreation areas we can stop by and eventually return back to our original pathway to the bay. The Delta has a rich network. Wouldn’t it be a shame to say I have to get out to the Bay as quickly as I can?” “There are multiple flexible ways to prepare for medical school,” he said. “It’s not just if you can’t do the first two years of pre-med then forget it. … It’s up to you. Don’t think of it as there is only one way to get there. You choose the way that’s best for you.” We hear about “non-traditional” pre-med pathways and know that they exist. But it means more than just majoring in something that doesn’t have “bio” somewhere in its name. A nontraditional path begins with an open mindset, where the opportunity to become a doctor need not start or end with undergrad and doesn’t necessarily involve a timeline or a checklist. And this often makes for a more enriching time at Stanford. “In carving out my own path, and I’ve found a lot of support and mentors where I did not expect to,” said Li. “I’ve really come to appreciate what Stanford has to offer and how many doors it opened for me.” Barr tells his advisees to change the question. “Don’t ask yourself if you want to be a pre-med — ask if you want to be a doctor. If the answer is yes, then go to med school.” Yes, you do have to make the grade. But graduating from Stanford should be telling enough. “The issue is not if are you smart enough to go to med school, but if you want to be a doctor. If you’re not sure if you want to be a doctor, there’s no point in going to med school. And if you’re not sure you want to go to
med school, there’s no point in investing all your undergrad time in pre-med courses. Once you’re sure you’re sure you want to be a doctor, then get yourself ready for med school.” There are people who took 10 gap years who now work as doctors. There are extension programs and post-bacs, and ways to plan it out so you don’t end up broke. There are many ways to get to where you want to be, and there are people willing to support your journey there. “There are multiple paths to becoming a doctor, and there is no one best path,” said Barr. “Each person has to find the path that fits them best.” Improvements and changes A little over a century after the Flexner Report, medical schools have heard, and they are starting to change. Donald Barr points to a 2013 article in the New England Journal of Medicine on how the AAMC is shifting towards a more “holistic review” of medical school applicants. In one table, desirable physician traits such as “commitment to service,” “empathy,” “capacity for growth,” and “emotional resilience” are mapped onto application data elements like history of engagement with service, essays and letters of reference, adversities overcome and “distance traveled” in life experiences. “Intellectual ability,” shown in part by “academic record,” is just one of many components in a holistic applicant. He also pointed out that the MCAT has changed from assessing “science recall” to “science competency.” It now has a section on the psychological and social foundations of behavior. And it focuses on the chemistry and physics relevant to biologic systems. As Barr notes, “Med schools are beginning to drop course requirements in lieu of demonstrated competency, leaving it more up to the students to figure out how to take the courses that will help them learn the material.” Stanford Medicine, for instance, “does not have specific course requirements, but a recommended preparation for the study of medicine.” Of course, the way we teach introductory science courses and how we onboard students interested in pursuing medicine can be improved. “There are many types of changes [we can make],” said Barr. “Curricular changes, changes in how you evaluate applicants, but also changes in the mindset of students who are thinking about being doctors — so you don’t feel like if you got a C+ in a science course, that’s it for your chances of being a doctor.” Barr points out Harvard’s two semester Life Sciences foundational courses, implemented in 2006. Courses are jointly taught by the chemistry and biology departments, designed to account for students’ different high school science backgrounds and enable students to take more focused pathways into science based on their personal interests.
Cohen suggests a survey course about the journey to becoming a doctor. “A lot of people decide to drop pre-med based on chemistry, which is not representative of the career,” he said. “I would much rather that Stanford offered some kind of course to give people a better sense of what pre-med or being a doctor was actually like, rather than students dropping out based on a chemistry course that has very little relation to what you’d actually be doing from day to day.” Changes are being made. Though there isn’t yet data to see what impact they will have, we must continue to provide feedback and work towards a new paradigm of what is means to be a doctor, and who gets to become a doctor. And paramount to this effort are students themselves, and how they believe pre-med will serve them as they go forward to careers in medicine and elsewhere. Going forward But as changes are being made, what do we do in the meanwhile? Whether or not you decide to make a four- or 14- or 20-year plan, remember that you are capable. Remember to look for support outside of advising, and collaborate. Do not be daunted by classes, hold the sunk cost principle to heart, and don’t be afraid to drop out or stay in. Pre-med dropouts and diehard pre-meds alike have some words of wisdom: • • • • • • • • • • •
Give it a shot — but don’t feel that you’re bound to it In fact, don’t commit to pre-med until your sophomore or junior year Spread the requirements out — don’t feel rushed about finishing everything Explore everything you can Immerse yourself in what a physician does day-to-day Remember there are innumerable equally (or more) impactful careers out there Things that feel useless can still be useful down the line Be passionate about things that need to be fixed Be passionate. Period. Don’t feel sad. Don’t feel pressured. Don’t feel scared. Go to office hours
We need doctors who are as diverse as the populations they serve. We need doctors who care about other people. We need doctors who read books and make art. We need doctors who believe in the art of medicine. We need doctors who are committed to social justice. We need doctors who are healthy, happy and unabashedly human. We need you. Contact Vivian Lam at vivlam25@stanford.edu. 19
Living while funny An ode to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler By Olivia Popp
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omedy goddesses, television geniuses, masters of all things funny — no matter what you call them, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are undeniably, indubitably and indisputably the best at what they do. But when buzzwords are passed all around the table at dinner and people tack on a variation of “in politically-charged times like these” to the end of their sentences, it’s time to take a step back, consider, and simply appreciate the way they make us laugh. And maybe even learn a little something from them. Fey and Poehler both got their start in comedy in Chicago, one of the comedy capitals of the world. Most notably, they met and hit it off at the iO Theater, then known as the ImprovOlympic Theater, eventually performing in shows together at The Second City, a comedy troupe and training school known for churning out names such as Steve Carell, Julia LouisDreyfus, Keegan-Michael Key and Aziz Ansari. Each independently moved to New York to pursue comedy, with Poehler co-founding the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB), a comedy group and school on par with The Second City, and Fey hired as a writer — and later cast member — on “Saturday Night Live” (SNL). Eventually, Poehler joined “SNL,” and the rest, of course, is history. Many have read Fey’s “Bossypants” or Poehler’s “Yes Please,” both autobiographical comedies. From them, you’ll glean Fey’s hyperextended dry-wit and Poehler’s zest for zaniness, and from their audiobooks, you’ll hear it even more. Fey, a nerd in college and claiming to never have taken drugs in her life, and Poehler, unsure about what she wanted and who spent her Chicago days smoking pot with friends, seem like people who, in alternate lifetimes, may never have met save for a serendipitous occasion. Yet while their paths and careers have been neither straightforward nor simple, I wouldn’t
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go as far as saying they’ve purposely made their lives overly complex for the sake of advancing their careers. I also wouldn’t call either of them “personalities,” as many comedians have been hailed to be. I’ve found that comedians often have a large number of followers on social media than their actor counterparts, even though their names have typically not circulated the same scope or spheres of media as traditional film and television — but neither Fey nor Poehler have social media accounts. Both of them have gained standing as being brutally honest and brutally ordinary. Both boast embarrassingly nerdy childhood (and college!) photos in their memoirs. Maybe there’s a certain appeal to their stories — a variant on the “smart is the new sexy.” But it’s not a rags-to-riches story, nor do they flaunt their pasts as veritable indicators of “being cool by being uncool.” Arguably, Fey and Poehler are “cool,” in an unusual sort of way. Nevertheless, failing to be big-name stars in their early years, they became exalted as heroes not only for every comedy nerd out there, but for people of all ages who come to know them as the utter epitome of comedy. I often take for granted that people know who Fey and Poehler are. Surrounded by others who like the same television and comedy as I do, I fail to realize when people have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. I like to start out by saying that comedy is under-appreciated — no, comedy is un-appreciated. Comedy is not deserving of our love, time, or effort. Comedy is the lowest of the low, denigrated to the shallowed tier of art, if art at all. But comedy is improv, sketch and stand-up. Comedy is performance, theater and your attitude toward life. Comedy is humor, amusement and enjoyment. Comedy is relatable, universal, specific and real. Comedy is preparation, spontaneity and timing. Comedy is juxtaposition, stating the obvious and real-world interaction. Comedy is using a series of phrases in a combination of interrelated sentences and then pointing out that you probably just read them in an intense narrator voice in your head. What I see when I watch the television shows “30 Rock” or “Parks and Recreation,” respectively Fey’s and Poehler’s most famous works, I simultaneously see life and what I lack from it. “30 Rock” is a surrealist comedy, and I revel in the moments when it makes fun of itself, breaks the fourth wall, or is not afraid to use the absurd or the eccentric to make the viewer laugh. “Parks and Recreation” is a mockumentary, but doesn’t have the same level of surreal humor as “30 Rock” — rather, it aims to use the awkward moments and glances at the camera to find comedy in those small moments. Fey’s “30 Rock” was essentially a dramatized version of her job as head writer at SNL. From that description alone, it makes “30 Rock” sound like one of the saddest, most boring
shows ever to grace primetime television. Yet the way it takes the characters and their problems and turns them into something so charmingly relatable is a level of comedic beauty that I’ll never be able to achieve. Same with “Parks and Recreation” — it’s not an over-dramatization of a workplace comedy. A similar argument might be made for “The Office”, but I find that Poehler’s character, Leslie Knope, on “Parks and Recreation”, amongst others on the show, are just straight-up likable because they feel like regular people, flaws and quirks and all. They’re not caricatures of people or twisted versions of ourselves — they’re us. I mark the Tina Fey era, the period when she was head writer (1999-2006), as the best comedy in modern day SNL. Many critics laud that time when she, coincidentally, also the first female head writer on the show, as a period that
ART STREIBER/NBC
revitalized the show. Fey cranked out many famous “fake ads,” parodying products or creating advertisements for products that were useless or appeared like a good idea, until suddenly, they were not. Something about these makes them so incredibly funny — they’re all extremely short sketches and remarkably low-key, but when I watch SNL today, I struggle to find the same amount of amusement out of the complex content that is on television versus the simple, almost “average” ideas of the Fey era. Fey and Poehler only co-anchored the SNL segment “Weekend Update” together for two seasons, 2004-2006, yet their time together on the show is forever engrained in comedic history. It’s not that I don’t also love the comedy that’s coming out nowadays. I do love my share of politically-infused comedy (“Veep”), meta and socially-active shows (“Master of None,” “Inse-
cure”) and the like. But a little voice sitting in the back of my mind nags and nags, desperate for some of the old stuff. Fey is currently working on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” which she writes and produces. Poehler produces “Broad City,” written by and starring UCB alums Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson. While Fey guest starred in both seasons of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (and fingers crossed, upcoming seasons as well), and Poehler guest-starred in a wild episode of “Broad City”, I miss the simplicity in their performances. Maybe I’m too picky and nostalgic about their old work and really just want a return to what I see as some of the best comedy on television ever. I love to see where their ventures will take them, because I know that I’ll be watching all of it, but I want to take time to savor their previous work that was simple and utterly perfect. Of their two cinematic collaborations, neither “Baby Mama” nor “Sisters” were commercial or critical successes. Those who like Fey and Poehler watched them, laughed and then went on with their day. Fey has acted in a number of dramas as well, achieving relative success; Poehler has done less work away from television, specifically comedy. A lot of comedians have successfully branched out into drama, but I don’t think it’s necessarily that they’ve tried and failed. For me, there’s something alluring about the simplicity of comedy. It’s hard to hide behind intense, heart-wrenching moments with comedy. Fey and Poehler have achieved something incredibly special and unique in their work, and it has enraptured an entire nation. Personally, I don’t like to call them “first ladies of comedy.” Honestly, I’m not sure what this title really entails. People may first argue that it’s not fair to have the label “ladies” in the title because that denotes a separation of genders. And yes, comedy is male-dominated, without a doubt. There are also plenty of talented, hysterical comedians out there who pursue their work with great success. I don’t even have an alternate title that I might suggest, which makes me even more unhelpful. But “first ladies” just doesn’t seem sufficient or descriptive enough for their work in comedy. Their style of comedy is specific, and I’m sure plenty of people have comedians that they prefer much more. But I think there’s something to be said about what I keep going back to on the simplicity of their art. Fey is famous for her deadpan delivery, particularly as co-anchor on “Weekend Update.” But that’s the thing about deadpan. In an objective sense, it’s not even supposed to be funny. For both Fey and Poehler’s shows, I wouldn’t even venture to call the content observational comedy, either. Maybe it’s their background in improv rather than stand-up comedy. Many comedians nowadays go on tour with their stand-up routines
even after they trained at improv schools around the country. I will readily admit that stand-up is incredibly hard — I’ve certainly never been courageous enough to try it myself. But with improv, you end up incorporating humor and comedy into your behavior, your gestures, your attitude, your speech, and your mannerisms — it’s just a different skill. With stand-up, often the comedy comes from pointing out things in life and making comments about the state of the world. So no matter how much Fey and Poehler write and produce, there’s something special about their presence onscreen — an inextricable aura that just emanates “funny.” My obsession with their comedy comes with a desire to bring their spirit of humor with them around with me wherever I go. At the bottom of my phone case is a silhouette of two figures, each holding an Emmy. Eagle-eyed onlookers will realize that it’s Fey and Poehler. The silhouettes are taken from a photo of them together, standing side-by-side, in fact holding Golden Globes as they posed, slightly dumbstruck, for a promotional photo before they hosted the 2015 Golden Globes. Poehler has been nominated for 18 Emmys and has won one; Fey has been nominated for 40 Emmys and won nine. Yet what’s so monumental about these achievements is that not only were they the first duo to be nominated and to have won, but also that this cements them as a legendary comedy pair. So when I couldn’t find a decent photo of them together with their Emmys, I jumped to memorialize their win by combining that priceless Golden Globes photo that captures their simple wit with an awards moment that deserved to be captured in time. When we’re off checking Twitter and asking ourselves what Trump has done now or what disaster has struck somewhere off in the world, I hesitate to trivialize these events by turning immediately to comedy. It’s both tough and emotionally useful to laugh about these events or satirize them, and even worse to turn a blind eye and simply ignore them all together in favor of watching television and going crazy over slapstick comedy. But when all is said and done, I believe there’s something to be said about thinking over the simplicity in which Fey and Poehler work with their art, their lives and their legacies. Without a need to riff off of others’ misfortunes or using circuitous methods to create laughs, comedy comes from an understanding that humor lies within the cracks of our own everyday lives. Every scrap of work they’ve done has helped me appreciate the essence of what I perceive as meaningful, and as a consequence, funny, in my life. So thank you, Tina Fey. And thank you, Amy Poehler. From the bottom of my heart — thank you. Contact Olivia Popp at opopp@stanford.edu. 21
Street Art of the Mission District, SF By Starr Jiang
Art intends to reinvent our perception of life. Nowhere else is that taken more literally than in the back alleys and abandoned corners of the Mission District in San Francisco, where chipped factory exteriors and decaying storefronts are transformed into canvases of rage, nostalgia and love by the artists that adopt them. Maybe their work is only paint-deep, only capable of creating the illusion of rebirth when time is about to take its toll. Or maybe there is something more, some inexplicable connection between art and the walls and the people that roam beside them. This project answers that question and asks some more.
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AN AMERICAN BARD IN BRITAIN: BOB DYLAN IN CONCERT
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t’s not often you get the chance to see a Nobel Laureate in concert, so when the opportunity presented itself – in the form of Bob Dylan playing three shows at the small, ornate London Palladium during my quarter abroad at Oxford – I took it. I arrived early in my Dylan t-shirt and found in my seat in the upper circle as audience members trickled in, wearing shirtsleeves and dresses. I’d felt vaguely anxious all day. Ordering a pint of ale from the bar, I realized it was most likely out of a kind of meeting-your-heroes sense of trepidation. Would these few hours live up to the lifetime’s worth of myth and meaning I’d built up around the man behind the microphone? I’d have felt almost more comfortable having Dylan remain a legend. As the lights dimmed, I wondered what the show would sound like. Would he play mostly jazz standards or more familiar songs from his own repertoire? Most likely he’d play whatever he wanted, with none of it sounding quite like it did in the studio. I had the strange sense that he might begin with “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” the dramatic opener
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to 2009’s “Together Through Life.” I was wrong – though he did play that song a few minutes into the show. In an early sign of what would prove to be a night rich with a sense of relevance, the show opened with a man striding onto stage right carrying a guitar, wearing a hat – not Dylan, though I thought so at first, my heart trembling. Dylan entered stage right and walked to the piano, a strange place to see him sit in light of his prior life as the young man with a harmonica and guitar. He started to sing the words to “Things Have Changed,” a cynical, bleakly contemporary take off 2006’s “Modern Times.” “People are crazy and times are strange / I used to care but things have changed,” the chorus goes. A shrugging apologia for his lukewarm reaction to being awarded the Nobel? A nod in the direction of critics who’ve said he’s lost his political sting? The song reminds me of something that might be sung in a time and place of lawlessness or many-sided war – a song from Machiavelli’s Italy, Thucydides’ Greece, or, perhaps, Cormac McCarthy’s Texas-Mexico border. In a year when traditional institutions, alliances and truces seem to be fraying
PEOPLE ARE CRAZY AND TIMES ARE STRANGE I USED TO CARE BUT THINGS HAVE CHANGED from North Korea to Britain, Dylan’s looking to the east, and he’s seeing the clouds rolling in. Dylan would sing an old song (pre-1980), a new song (post-1990), then a jazz standard. The band around him played a robust, swaying, sort of folksy guitar and violin sound, reminiscent of Ray LaMontagne or the accompaniment on “Soon After Midnight” off 2012’s “Tempest.” The lights changed from stark-from-high-above to warm and close on the jazz standards. Dylan would stand up from the piano in his sparkly suit and blackand-white tap shoes, take the microphone stand so that one leg of its tripod rested on the ground behind him, and sing with his legs bowed wide apart, taking a single step
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
BY NICK BURNS
backward or forward from time to time. His singing on the jazz standards – crooning, it must be called, though that word seems to stick in the throat describing the sermonizing nasality of Dylan’s voice – was, remarkably, exquisite. There was pathos crammed into the final syllable of “Autumn Leaves,” Dylan holding the word “fall” in a sorrowful, quiet quaver as the warm, gentle sound of the accompaniment died out around him. Now, as always, the beauty of Dylan’s work exceeds (or, more likely, is all bound up in) his insistence on confounding expectations and imploding anyone’s theory about his work and its significance. Critics haven’t missed the irony in Dylan’s latest habit of recording covers just as his lyricism is crowned with literature’s highest laurel or in his adoption of the songbook and the accouterments of an epoch in American music and culture that he played a major part in demolishing. I’d had a hard time finding the significance in his covers, but on “Autumn Leaves” it seemed to click. A classicizing tendency, an acknowledgment of his own waning season. However, either Dylan’s vocal capacities have weakened regarding the louder notes of his rock repertoire, or he has become disenchanted with some of its beauty. He sang many of these songs to the same notes – as if the verses on every song were the verses of “Long and Wasted Years” from “Tempest” (which, notably, also featured on the setlist). High note at the beginning of the verse, mostly the same note through the middle of the verse, low note at the end. This formula takes some of the energy out of Dylan’s beautiful earlier songs, I noticed during an unmoving “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” However, it also encourages the audience to seek beauty in new places in his songs. With that inimitable nasal bray gone from the final two notes of the opening line to the classic “Desolation Row,” (“They’re selling postcards of the hanging”), the great flourish came instead at the end, when Dylan sang the final line (“Don’t send me no more letters, no / Not unless you mail them from Desolation Row”) ascending and then descending down the octave, which lent the song a sense of an ending and a tongue-in-cheek pompousness that the 1965 recording lacks. The band played a galloping rendition of “Highway 61 Revisited” as Dylan sang, “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’” with all the fabulistic, decadent vision of late 1965. As the chords of “Tangled Up In Blue” played, tears sprang to my eyes. Dylan did great justice to that song with its tenderness towards remembered moments both of connection and of missed connection. “They never did like mama’s homemade dress,” he sang, describing how the song’s narrator suffers when his
lover’s parents disapprove of his own family. “Tempest” and “Highway 61 Revisited” featured most prominently in the catalog of earlier songs Dylan played. The choice of these two albums is significant. “Highway 61” displays all the Beat madness of the 60s, Dylan’s final abandonment of folk for good, a statement that the old order was dead and the new one not yet formed. “Tempest,” on the other hand, is dark and bloody, displaying Dylan’s capacity for callousness and violence in levels not seen since “Idiot Wind” off of 1975’s “Blood on the Tracks.” It’s a fantastic album and one I was not at all chagrined to see so well represented on the night, making up nearly a quarter of the setlist. “Two-timin’ Slim? Who’s ever heard of him? / I’ll drag his corpse through the mud,” Dylan growls on “Soon After Midnight,” a cold, visceral threat embedded in an otherwise tender, jazz-standard-esque love ballad of sorts. The same song also features a Dylan staple in its last line, namely the cruel, backhanded confession of love: “When I met you, I didn’t think you would do / It’s soon after midnight, and I don’t want nobody but you.” I noticed also in the songs Dylan sang from “Tempest” that night more than other times a sense of memento mori. On the burlesque “Duquesne Whistle,” a song steeped in the early twentieth century and, perhaps, Dylan’s own distant past in rural Minnesota, he sings of a train “blowin’ like she ain’t gon’ blow no more.” A burr in his voice on the final syllable seemed to point the meaning of the phrase back at himself. It’s more explicit on the marching “Early Roman Kings”: “I ain’t dead yet,” Dylan grins, “My bell still rings / I keep my fingers crossed / like the early Roman kings.” Visions of death and visions of history combine. Again, I think of a time of barbarism and strange rituals, of blood and darkness and mystery. Dylan’s invoking of the early days of Rome is right on target: A strange time, described by Livy in his histories – the age of Tarquin and Numa, an age before reading and writing; of mysterious rites that, when performed incorrectly, lead the gods to slay the men who profane them with bolts of lightning. Dylan did not speak a word during the entire performance. After “Autumn Leaves,” he and the band left the stage, to return after the audience called for an encore. The band played two more songs, both fascinating choices. First was a nearly unrecognizable “Blowin’ In the Wind” – the last vestige of Dylan’s old, old millenarian optimism, offered perhaps as nothing more than a cruel joke at the expense of hopes for peace in a world of men beginning once more to tear at each other’s throats. Second, and finally, was “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” that strangest
MY BELL STILL RINGS I KEEP MY FINGERS CROSSED LIKE THE EARLY ROMAN KINGS of songs from “Highway 61.” Most famous perhaps for its marking of a high-water point in Dylan’s absurdist songwriting style (including, as it does, the rather unfortunate line “Now you see this one-eyed midget / Shouting the word ‘NOW’”), and a surprising choice of finishing song, I considered it as a political song for the first time that night. The song mocks the titular thin man, who despite thinking himself clever, finds himself at a loss as a gallery of social outcasts torment him, trying to convince him he’s one of them. “Because something is happening here, / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?” the song’s chorus insists. Is the thin man an establishment politician – a moderate Republican, a Clintonite Democrat, a Europhile Tory – confounded by the gallery of sneering populists? Or is the thin man Donald Trump, convinced of his own superiority but tormented by judges, his own party, and a persistent inability to quite grasp exactly what that “something” that’s happening is? The line itself sounds almost like something he’d say. Regardless, the song’s indictment, maybe originally meant to criticize the 1960s intellectual who finds himself unable to understand the monstrous new evolutions of American culture (like, perhaps, Jack Kerouac, betrayed by the counterculture movement he helped found), applies now to all of us as affiliates of Stanford, card-carrying members of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia, all of us who failed to apprehend, and later to understand, the monstrous surge of fury of 2016, the grotesque figures of the new populism. It is not an optimistic note to end on. Finished with the song, Dylan stood up from the piano and stood with the band in front of their instruments. They did not bow or gesture to the audience but merely stood there, like workers looking upon a day’s work, proud; or else like men facing a firing squad. The light fell on Dylan’s hat, his face hidden in shadow. One could barely make out his curved mustache which further concealed that cruel mouth. Did I see a glimmer in one eye? He turned, and the men of the band walked out behind the curtain. The lights went on. I wandered like a dreamer down Oxford Street towards the bus back to Oxford. Contact Nick Burns at njburns@stanford.edu. 27
LIGHTROOM By Ryan Cohen PLANETIZED The front of Main Quad and the Oval from a 360-degree view
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Paris airport In an airport cafe the most prevalent noise is the escalator endlessly mimicking stairs A woman absently asks what time is it? Three people respond every offering different They turn to look at each other blinkingly One says I’ve just come from Bangkok Haley Harrington
As the platform filled and emptied - an inconsistent tide of impatiently bent knees, idle chatter - the little bird watched. Delicate head tilting at the intervals of collection and release. Sometimes fluttering up so as to momentarily hover a few feet above the dirty tile when the clatteringrushing sound of arrival drowned out whatever sounds had been filling the wait. From up there, the bird could see the point of realization on the stairs, where the magnetism of the selfish, unwaiting train created a frantic increase in velocity. All bodily movement screaming don’t leave me. Then a bored noise announcing departure. With only a few floating remnants of the former flood, each deep in their own private world, the bird settles down somewhere the tide is likely to eddy, far below the sky everyone speaks of so grandiosely. Haley Harrington
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Berlin Had Walls I pass them on Oranienstrasse Just before it crosses Skalitzerstrasse and Gorlitzer Bahnhof Just past the mural of dead marionette animals Crunching over chatter and forks from Que Pasa Their footsteps fill the middle of the street in unforgiving rows A radio grumbles My stomach suddenly small and hard They look straight ahead, focused and cold Ahead an indistinct rumble grows Drowns out the heavy black fabric moving in unision I keep walking because I don’t think to stop until Shouting fists hand painted signs a vast broiling sea Shouting The sun is long and late Glints off boot brims and batons firm in waiting holsters A man on the back of a truck Feet spread wide Speaks whipping words into a microphone Another speaks into a radio Haley Harrington
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HATS OFF By DAVID STEINBERG CONTRIBUTOR
Across 1. Sigma ___ 4. Say repeatedly 11. Yellowstone animal 14. Song that charts 15. Genre for Korn and Limp Bizkit 16. Negative in a list 17. Apple pie ___ mode 18. “I’m not convinced” 19. Word after long or years 20. Angry customer’s threat 22. “Later!” 24. Subtly malicious 26. Annual cookie eater 27. Leave out 29. Home for a sultan’s wives 31. Like Lord Voldemort 34. Review on Yelp 35. Give off, as charm 36. Long truck 37. Desperately needing rain 38. Nutrient in All-Bran
39. Disneyland vehicle 40. “Alternative fact” 41. San Jose Earthquakes’ org. 42. Feature of some jeans 44. Tinder bio number 45. ___ and Herzegovina 47. Connectors 49. Very thin pasta 53. Ill will 56. Female deer 57. Kind of congestion 61. Punny message for the Class of 2017 64. Common succulent 65. Increases 66. Partner of talk and text 67. Texting and driving, e.g. 68. Many freshmen 69. Improv routine
Down 1. Indian tea variety
2. Biker’s challenge 3. Washington and others 4. Data for a program 5. Game with jails 6. Mopey music style 7. Gun, as an engine 8. <--- homophone 9. Civil War hero? 10. Rock star John 11. Site of many NASA launches 12. S with a tree, for Stanford 13. “Don’t Wanna ___” (2016 Maroon 5 hit) 21. Full 23. AP Stats procedure 25. Vertical graph line 26. Meal featuring matzo 27. Toothbrush brand 28. Princess Peach’s hero 30. Barbecue spice mix 32. Picture 33. Sour green fruits
41. Gold digger? 43. Cover with color 46. “Dog Whisperer” channel, casually 48. Hair ties hold them together 50. ___ Bauer (clothing brand) 51. Hair pest 52. ___ of Troy 53. Use self-checkout 54. Sport with horses 55. Not clueless about 58. Hit with a water gun 59. Rihanna album featuring “Work” 60. Aspiring J.D.’s exam 62. Cantor contents 63. Braying animal
Solution on page 2. Contact David Steinberg at davids19@stanford.edu. 32