Two weeks ago, I wrote about Prof. Shloss and the vibrant, electric Lucia Joyce she had found overlooked by the flow of time. I find it appropriate then to focus on senior Olayinka Fagbayi this week: Olayinka has a radiance and a palpable charisma that must also have exuded from Lucia Joyce. Olayinka has embraced a rich variety of experiences that embody the passion I hope to highlight weekly in this feature.

Olayinka graduated a year early from high school and went to Thailand to teach English with the American Field Service. There she learned Thai and Laos, worked as a cheerleading coach and dance instructor and also traveled across many of the remote regions of the country. She came back to the States and started to prepare herself for attending Georgetown in the fall. The day before she was supposed to leave, bags packed and tickets booked, she “knew it wasn’t time for me to go to college. So nope, not going.” This spotlights one of the most notable things I came to see in Olayinka during our interview: she has an amazing ability to listen to herself and follow her intuition.

Instead of attending Georgetown, Olayinka traveled to Cuenca, Ecuador, to learn Spanish. In Cuenca she worked at an orphanage, choreographed a local high school’s rendition of “Grease” and taught at a local dance school. She woke up early to kickbox, putting to practice the black belt she earned when she was 13. She then moved to Oakland, where Oakland High School hired her to tutor juniors in various subjects. Once hired, she quickly became the lead chemistry teacher for a core set of students, even though she had only just graduated from high school two years earlier. She also danced with Mind Over Matter and Khaotic, two prominent Bay Area hip-hop dance groups. Olayinka rounded out her busy schedule with night classes at CSU-Hayward, earning the credits that allowed her to transfer to Stanford as a sophomore.

Her achievements did not cease upon her arrival at the Farm. Olayinka is currently finishing her first book, working on a different short novel, spending many hours each week doing chemistry research and dancing and choreographing for hip-hop group dv8.

When asked about how she juggles her myriad activities, she responded, “Not being too focused in one particular area allows me to have the peripheral vision to be able to see all of these things that might happen.” These words perfectly illustrate how Olayinka meets the world as an equal, rather than letting it consume her or dictate her life.

Olayinka also brought up what she referred to as the “bookmarks of her life” — the events that defined and changed her. She primarily discussed the passing of “her love,” Manuel Stahl, just over a year ago. I could feel that she continued to love him and allow herself to feel sad about his passing, which moved and catalyzed me more than any other part of the interview.

When I asked Olayinka about how she found herself in having all these experiences, she explained that she likes to think she manifests them. She doesn’t consciously try to reach a certain goal or achievement, but everything she does has to be an extension of who she is. She noted that, “people say that the challenges are the things that make you. It’s not true; it’s the summation of the good and the bad. The bad...you can just remember them better.”

At the end of the interview, I asked Olayinka if she had any advice about finding and realizing one’s passion or any other subject. She offered a number of sage words I would never have expected to hear from a 22-year-old. Most notably she said to get off campus at least once a week, work towards something but remain able to live life at every moment, and “know that in the end you’re okay, everyone’s okay...it’s okay.” Her voice quality changed as the final sentence finished, lost some of its earthly leashes and expressed a fulfillment and a hope.