Hello everyone. My name is Chris, and I’m excited to have been selected as a columnist for The Stanford Daily. Over the next four years, I hope we’ll become great friends.

I’m originally from New Jersey, so I imagine I’ll have some self-deprecating jokes that I’ll occasionally throw in about my weird background. My father was a religious studies major at UC Santa Cruz and still can?t remember how many drugs he took. He?s now a corporate lawyer. If you think that?s strange, my mom was in the Stanford Band.

This entire campus is so new and strange to me. There is so much to comment on here.

Maybe I’ll write next week about IHUM or PWR and talk about the crazy types of people that one might encounter in said classes. I bet there are interesting people that are at times too knowledgeable or too enthusiastic about the topics discussed. Or maybe I’ll write about Full Moon on the Quad and how it’s not nearly as scandalous as it once was, but, rather, a PG-rated hug fest with none of the risque free-love it once had. I have no idea — I haven’t experienced it yet. But whatever I write about, it’ll be completely original and different.

Later in my freshman year, I could totally see myself writing about joining a fraternity and/or co-operative house. While initially mocking both groups, I will find both to have welcoming and interesting people, and I must choose between them and the love of a woman, in addition to solving the mystery of the steam tunnel murders, in a dramatic finale of season two.

I look forward to spending the next four years investigating this overwhelming place and, hopefully, making it my own. During my middle years I’ll probably take up campus causes. I wonder what kind of student government Stanford has. I bet the average Stanford student doesn’t know about the Machiavellian dealings that exist right under their noses. Maybe I’ll become a senator and eventually a member of a high-profile committee, rising to popularity among the caucusing student groups due to my great collection of tweed jackets and my ability to quote Sun Tzu with a dead-on Sean Connery impression.

Maybe I’ll grow tired of the cocktail parties and the petition-forging and decide, on a whim, to blow the lid off a huge election fraud cover-up and fight to expose the grave injustices rendered by power-hungry and corrupt politicians. No longer a suave political hack, I’ll be hailed as a hero for my pivotal role in exposing corruption on this most important of stages. I’ll spend most of my junior year writing from the front lines of student protests, cutting my enemies down with thinly veiled satire and causing none-too-small a stir at faculty brunches.

Maybe I’ll make a joke about pirates and ninjas, because, man, is that topical.

During my junior year, perhaps I, too, will study abroad and have a deep and moving experience with a culture that is foreign to me but provides some greater truth that all cultures can appreciate. I will share these groundbreaking nuggets of wisdom on a weekly basis. I shall title this series of columns “Pretentious Letters from Spain.”

Then, when I return, I will have several bitter senior moments. I’ll become a bohemian who smokes cigarettes and uses words like querulous to describe people. Inevitably, I’ll feel the pressure of the real world coming and will lash out at a system that is seemingly unfun, or at least less fun than when I was a freshman. I’ll take on the persons who crack down on parties or free speech or free crack.

Maybe I’ll do a piece examining the generous donor who keeps funding and then building all of these interesting buildings on campus. I bet a well planned, balanced discussion on how said donor is perceived by students and how the administration relates to him/her would be very interesting. I imagine that such an investigative piece of journalism would be welcomed by the Stanford community because it discusses the very soul of the University. I look forward to writing it.

And, in the end, after I’ve written all I could have written, I would hope to write a worthy and appropriate finale that captures my love for this place. Maybe in that piece, people would understand that my satires were meant in the deepest love and respect for the school I’d attended.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Chris Holt. I write for The Stanford Daily.