Both Anna and Parham think the New York Times magazine article overdramatized their disappointment after their rejections. "It was always a childhood thing to go to Harvard so I figured I would apply. But it was never like, 'Whoa! I was devastated when I didn't get it' or something," Parham says. "Obviously, any kind of rejection is not going to be happy, but I just figured, like, 'Oh, so I got rejected. It's not a big deal.'"

Anna and Parham remain friends, and when Anna comes home, she and Parham sometimes meet up for a drink at Miyagi's, a sushi restaurant overlooking Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Both remember Maya from afar, never becoming close with the super-involved, yet soft-spoken classmate. "She was a musician, and she had basically the same grades I did," Anna says. "I wasn't surprised she got in."

Once she got to Stanford, many first-years immediately recognized Anna as the Mandarin Chinese-speaking blond girl from the cover of the New York Times magazine. "I think it really struck a chord because I think a lot of people are kind of bitter they didn't get in," she says now. "It was really trippy... Everyone was like, 'Oh, I didn't get in either.' Blah, blah, blah. So then it really didn't seem like a big deal to me at all."

And Stanford seemed to be a good match. Being in the heart of technology country sparked an interest in computer science courses, which she insists she would not have touched at Harvard. But it was also her first programming course that, combined with bronchitis, led to "meltdown" and one of her most stressful moments during college. "I was just a mess," she says.

A good lottery number let Anna's rooming group live a row house for two years--prime real estate on Stanford's campus. She currently shares a two-room double in a house named Xanadu. Chelsea Clinton lives upstairs.

Her social life grew out of a close-knit group of first-year friends. They have skiied at Tahoe together and, junior year, they dressed up as the Spice Girls for a Halloween party. Anna wore a tiny light-blue dress and pulled her hair into pigtails--"Baby Spice" for the evening.

Early on, she met Juan Bruce, a product design major, who eventually became her boyfriend. "There was this whole traumatic thing, but we ended up together at the beginning of sophomore year," she reports.