Ramit Sethi's Stanford advisor told him to take the minimum 12 units instead of overloading. The advice: your first year is for making friends and meeting professors, not maxing out classes. He still calls it the best guidance he ever got.
Okay, you want to know the best advice I ever got? It was very counterintuitive. It was the first week of being at Stanford, and we each had an advisor who took us out to coffee and would share some advice. And my advisor told me something I'll never forget. She said, "You can take up to 20 units." And everybody who comes to Stanford, a lot of people, they want to be academic studs. They want to take 20 units because it's so cool, so hard. She's like, "Take 12. Literally take the minimum." And I looked at her like, "What?" I was used to overachieving, and I saw 12 as underachieving. She goes, "You're not here to simply take classes, especially your first year. You're here to make friends. You're here to join clubs. You're here to meet professors. So don't worry about taking more classes right now. Just focus on meeting a bunch of people." That was some of the best advice I ever got.
