Rehan Adamjee

“Back in Pakistan, where I grew up, I used to spend a great deal of time racing competitively. The running track was also a metaphor for a clearly defined path out of Pakistan with a clear end and beginning – those who figured out a way to train and run effectively would succeed. Many of us who come to Stanford have trained ourselves, over the years, to succeed along linear paths. The irony is that on this campus a whole world opens up to us and yet we are still programmed to remain wedded to defined paths, fearful of not being able to achieve a goal that can be easily captured by the category of major, or job, or career. Much of my time here has been spent trying to resist the pull of a stable, conventional goal-focused existence, something I have not always been successful at doing.”

 

“The Stanford track holds a powerful symbolic value for me. When I come here for a late-night run, it sometimes pulls me back into the lure of stability, but then I am reminded immediately of the pitfalls of such thinking. I am reminded that I did not come here to merely extend my high-school self while giving my goals a new dressing and an impressive sounding lingo to go along with them. Rather, as the class of 2016 prepares to leave this campus, we are left with much inspiration and responsibility to live out our lives imaginatively, to be myth-makers of the most creative kind rather than expert racers on running tracks.”

Rehan Adamjee, ’16, Economics and Public Policy (major), History (minor)