ORLANDO, FLORIDA | Rose Zhang is talking about slowing down, but there is nothing about her life these days that would seem to qualify as “pumping the brakes.” You remember being a college student, no? Late nights, big weekends, lots of pizza? Goofing off, getting lost on the phone and sleeping until noon?
To say Rose Zhang, all of 20, is living her life at a snail’s pace would be like saying Richard Petty used to drive slowly. Zhang’s life as she begins her first full season on the LPGA and third full “season” as a full-time student at Stanford moves with the pace of a plastic wrapper in a tornado.
It’s busy. It’s crazy. All that is thrown at Rose Zhang, and all that she handles, is downright impressive. Staggering, really. She just sails along, moving on down life’s sidewalk as if she were floating in some dream. In many ways, she is.
Where to start? Well, school might be a good place. She is probably halfway home to a degree, needing 180 credit hours to complete her studies at Stanford. (At this point in the interview, this writer had to lean in closely and doublecheck the number with Zhang. One-eight-zero, she clarified. To which I thought to myself, Wow, I’d probably still be in school.)
Stanford University isn’t exactly one of those institutions that one finds on the inside cover of a matchbook. It is the real deal, Ivy-like, hold your Harvards and Yales, with all those higher-learning bells and whistles. Zhang recently completed a third move in a short window: from her parents’ home in Irvine, California, to Las Vegas to start a fledgling pro golf career, and now back to Palo Alto, near campus. To be a Stanford student again.
She takes classes in person, on campus, and is carrying a full load of four courses this semester. She was up until 12:30 the other night working on finishing an assignment for her statistics class, closed the computer, and was on the tee in a matter of hours to make a 7:30 a.m. shotgun in the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions. Being Rose Zhang is not a part-time gig.
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