This story came to our attention through a bunch of large Stanford mailing lists, and we think it’s well worth a read – especially if you are still in High School. The full email, as it came through to us, follows.
Hi, all. I dropped out in 2011, halfway through my junior year, and it’s been an interesting ride since. I used to write columns for the Daily, and wrote my last right before I dropped out. Since then I’ve wanted to write kind of a follow-up. It ended up being a little longer than expected and isn’t 100% complimentary of Stanford, so the Daily probably won’t publish it. So I’ll just put it here if anyone’s interested. Would love some feedback; happy to answer questions.
I used to send out periodic rants to various e-mail lists, so this is making me nostalge hardcore. 
Best,
Robin Thomas
—–
I dropped out of Stanford two years ago, and now I support myself running the small business I founded to sell the product I invented.
Living the dream, right? Back in high school I used to joke about my plan to get into Stanford, drop out after two years, and make a million dollars. And now here I am (with two out of the three so far).
Except nothing went the way it was supposed to. If it had, right now I’d be in the Marine Corps, a Lance Corporal or Corporal, pretty low on the totem pole, about to start my second year as a Combat Correspondent. I didn’t drop out of Stanford to go do the start-up thing; I dropped out because I was absolutely miserable. I didn’t leave to take some internship at Google or rub elbows with VCs; I left to do whatever felt as distant as possible from college and the Silicon Valley. But for some reason, while half my Stanford classmates wanted to be entrepreneurs, I’m the one who ended up starting a business.
This is the fifth time I’ve started this letter over from the beginning. I’m at a McDonald’s in the Philadelphia Airport on a layover from my new home in DC to SFO. I’ve been invited out to the Bay Area for a week by another small business and they’re conveniently located right across Sand Hill Road from the Stanford Mall. I know so many other people who felt depressed, alone, and most of all stuck at Stanford; I have a story to share about getting out, and now seems like a good time to tell it. But somehow it’s hard to say “I’m really, really happy and this is how it happened, and this is how you can do it too” when all my advice boils down to “be yourself”. “Be yourself” sounds profound when you hear it from a forty-something with years of experience behind them; i think it sounds stupid coming from a 23-year-old white boy who works by himself in a basement.
But I’m happy with my life. Really, really happy. At Stanford I met a lot of people who had one-in-a-million accomplishments, piles of money, beachfront houses, all kinds of skills and talents and the world at their feet. I met almost none who could honestly say they were happy.
The brand Stanford builds for itself is that you can expect Stanford to accomplish anything, and the branding worked on me because I showed up freshman year expecting everything. I expected Stanford to be the place I’d finally fit in, where everyone would be really smart yet also self-confident enough to be themselves and have fun, and there’d be awesome drunk 4 AM conversations in the dorm hallways about the physics and ethics of Batman. I expected to learn so much in class because “class” would finally mean more than lectures and reading texts and writing papers.
It turned out Stanford students are humans too, just like everyone else, except they have the added disadvantages of not knowing how to fail and knowing all too well that going to Stanford is a Great Opportunity and they have no right or reason to be anything other than happy all the time. It turned out Stanford’s classes were great for some but not for most. There’s a kind of person that learns really well from lectures and reading texts and writing papers, and for this kind of person Stanford is easily the best of all possible environments. I’m not one of those people. I always thought that the A-average I’d carried from kindergarten through my junior year at Stanford meant I learned really well in a classroom, but after taking a full course load every quarter and not being able to remember anything after a final exam, I realized that actually I’d just gotten really good at taking tests.
Protip Number One when you’re having a slump in college is to branch out and try different activities. I joined Fleet Street, did Mock Trial, Gaieties, and Dance Marathon, went to Cape Town, took Improv and ballroom dance and Design and Spanish and lots of Urban Studies, saw a counselor at Vaden, wrote for the Daily, went steam tunneling, ran the Dish a few times a week, had an awesome bombshell girlfriend, a car on campus, and great dormmates. I did everything that was supposed to be making the most of my Stanford experience, and nowhere did I find the linchpin to make the experience everything it was supposed to be.
So I left. That was hard. It took two-and-a-half years and a whole lot of weekends spent alone in my dorm room watching Failblog, staying up all night putting off three hours of homework until one hour before it was due, not really looking forward to anything except the next meal in the dining hall. You get an opportunity that 99% of the world could only dream of, at the cost of some other kid somewhere getting a rejection letter, and you can’t even appreciate it? What an ungrateful brat.
The reality is that college isn’t right for everyone. Logically you know that nothing’s right for everyone, but when you’ve spent 18 years being told again and again that college is the exception, staying objective isn’t so easy.
So I switched my expectations over to the Marines. Classroom schooling hadn’t been the answer to everything but maybe the opposite, the school of hard knocks, would be. The Marine Corps would be where I’d finally fit in — where everyone would be self-confident enough to be themselves because they shared the same sense of honor and commitment and passion for justice.
Turns out Marines are humans too, like Stanford students. Two weeks after graduating Boot Camp I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, prescribed a double-dose of Prozac every day, and put on permanent suicide watch for three months while I waited to get discharged for being psychiatrically unfit — officially an “Erroneous Enlistment” which is the military’s way of saying they screwed up by not seeing the warning signs and letting me join up in the first place.
There are two nice things about feeling like you’ve hit bottom. First, it gives you some clarity about life because you don’t really have anything to lose. Second, you get good at rolling with the punches. These combined give you a lot of freedom to live your life pretty much however you want.
Until that point I’d been expecting other things — jobs, experiences, money, people — to be the key to happiness. It meant not only a lot of putting my eggs in one basket but also a lot of trying to change myself to match what I thought was expected of me. If this wasn’t achieving the desired outcome then logically the next step would be trying to not expect anything from anyone else, nor let anyone expect anything of me.
That meant that instead of going back to finish up a West Coast Ivy education I stayed at home in Cincinnati and looked at table-waiting jobs, because I thought waiting tables sounded fun, or at least like a good way to learn about people. When I was offered a short gig with a nonprofit in Washington, DC, I ended up redesigning half their HR systems and exponentially increasing organization-wide efficiency because it was FUN, even though it was pretty clearly outside my authority because I was brought on as a recruitment intern. When I came up with a cool little invention and was advised to get investors and try to pass myself off as a professional established business, I instead made it abundantly clear that my “business” was just a young friendly guy in a basement learning as he went.
And now here I am, paying myself to spend all day messing around on the Internet, learning how to make websites and file taxes and make cool stuff — all of which I did already because I enjoy it. The more I do what feels natural, the more the world seems to reward me.
What a neat trick! You grow up in a society of how-to books and “ten steps to becoming an entrepreneur” and it turns out all you have to do to be who you want to be is to be who you are. I don’t think an entrepreneur is a person who comes up with great ideas; I think an entrepreneur is a person who lets themselves be so possessed by an idea that they’ll naturally end up making it great without even meaning to. The idea doesn’t have to be a product or a business; a stay-at-home mom who blogs honestly and openly about raising kids because she loves it is as much an entrepreneur as someone who invents a new computer. Entrepreneurship isn’t a measure of accomplishments; it’s a measure of self-commitment.
If you’re happy at Stanford, stay. If you’re not happy, leave. Either way, make it a deliberate decision — you’re choosing to stay or you’re choosing to leave. You’re no longer just following the rules in the expectation that some day they’ll start granting you freedom. I think Stanford’s quietly on the same page with me here judging by how easy they make it to take time off; you can defer your admission or take off up to two years as an undergrad and come back pretty much whenever you want with no sort of penalty.
The author can be contacted at robin@thenoteboard.com. Don’t forget to comment – they are 100% anonymous, and all comments coming from within Stanford campus are marked with a little duck.
