Dear Future Stanford Roommate

Written in 2015. This was my essay response to Stanford’s “write a note to your future roommate” prompt. It illuminates one of my favorite things in life: wide-ranging, long conversations. It also describes the first all-nighter I ever pulled.

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I love sleepovers. Last summer I stayed with my friend, Deepti, to design her piano recital program and just have fun. At 1:00 AM we flopped onto her couch, trying to figure out what to do next.

I looked at her disorganized stacks of games and DVDs. “Do you have a photographic memory?” I teased.

"Is that even real?" asked Deepti. On the computer, we looked up photographic memory and then eidetic memory, which we discovered had no correlation with intelligence or emotional well-being.

How could intelligence be defined, anyway? Unable to agree and full of questions, we started on Wikipedia, moved to its Psychology page, and finally dissected the Pixar movie Inside Out, which features so many perfect metaphors about the brain's workings. We analyzed the movie's argument about the role of sadness in our lives. We talked about the longevity of painful versus happy memories, the purpose of regret, and amnesia's effect on personality. We questioned selfhood by asking how a person's life experiences affect her present decisions, and how her decisions define her personality.

As we talked, the morning sun rose without our notice. Reluctantly, we got off the couch and crawled into our sleeping bags, but my mind was buzzing too much for me to fall asleep. I love hanging out with others and exchanging ideas.

This is how I picture college – one long sleepover of great talks with you.