When I came to college, I was sure that I would soon become one of those students who disappear all week into the library, the ones whose best friends are the grad students at their advisors’ lab. In retrospect, there was little basis for this assumption, since even in high school I was a very lazy person.

Both my parents are professionals with doctorates, and while neither demanded that I follow any particular career, the assumption was that I would eventually be filled with a passion for law or molecular chemistry and be swept along to graduate school.

But, things did not turn out that way. From the moment I stepped onto campus I was confronted with the dilemma that would soon come to occupy much of my time here.

I am not very comfortable in social situations, and I find life here very lonely. When I am alone, I feel very little desire for human contact. At home, I can go for weeks without speaking to someone who is not in my immediate family. But at college, the masses are unavoidable. And they are always there, leading interconnected lives.

Even when my door was closed, people were right outside, carrying on conversations, making friendships, falling in love. My once-enjoyable solitude now made me feel like I was being shut out of campus life. Simple interpersonal interactions were extremely difficult for me. When I was around people, I was extremely uncomfortable, and when I was in large groups of people, I’d find it difficult to strike up conversations. It took me years to learn how to casually call up a friend or drop by their room to hang out. I rapidly discovered that I was not the kind of person who could juggle a social life and other responsibilities.

I could have, and perhaps I should have, done what many of my friends did: I could have moved into Mirrielees, isolated myself and let my tenuous relationships wither away. It would have been a momentary pain, but perhaps I could have stopped obsessing over what I was missing.

Instead, I decided that I would overcome these deficiencies within myself. I threw myself into the social scene. I rushed fraternities (abysmally). I forced myself to go to parties, and once there, I forced myself to stay at them, not really interacting with anyone, just sort of drifting along in the background until they finally ended and I could wander home. I drew into 680 Lomita and then spent the next two years in Synergy, possibly the worst possible place on campus for someone with my inclinations.

And this life has had its satisfactions. I have made friends, many more than I would have ever thought possible. I’ve interacted with a wide range of people, had many interesting conversations and gone on a scattering of adventures. But all this has happened at a substantial cost to my schoolwork and the sort of intellectual life I thought I would lead at college.

And my internal progress has not nearly been as complete as I would have hoped. I still get anxious about calling people. I still find large gatherings awkward, find it hard to speak to people I don’t know and am uncomfortable interacting with new groups. I’m still not sure that I have the sort of close friends that many people at Stanford seem to acquire so easily, and I’ve yet to recapture the sort of easy comfort I had in high school.

In seven weeks, I will graduate. I can’t really regret the way I have spent my time here. There was no other way I could have acted. But if I sacrificed my academics merely to learn that friendship and popularity are not the sort of prize that will make me happy, that seems a thin sort of lesson to learn from four years and $200,000 of higher education.

Rahul Kanakia is entitled to some navel-gazing. Email him at rahkan "at" stanford.edu.