As the minutes click by and the chance to speak snakes through the room, getting closer to me, I have only a big, fat blank.

I’m beginning to think I might be in over my head. That applying for this class might have been a mistake. That applying for this school might have been a mistake.

The question has reached the guy sitting in front of me. He stands up, introduces himself as Joe. He takes a second to mention the place he was born before moving on to all the places he has interned.

I can’t blame him. If I wasn’t a freshman whose job experience included mowing lawns, scooping ice cream and sorting the book drop at the library, I would probably do the same. When else are you gonna find yourself in the presence of Dustin Thomas?

After all, he is not just a billionaire, but a billionaire-maker. A venture capitalist, Thomas was an early investor in companies like Instafriend. Yep, that Instafriend. He’s the guy who helped turn a group of kids working out of a dorm room into tycoons.

Now he’s pretty much retired and tells all the tech blogs that he just wants to teach one class a year about the work ethic required for entrepreneurship, and research how the study of human behavior can be harnessed for marketing.

We are all here pretending we care about those topics so that we can be in the same room as him. And maybe be around when he decides to come out of retirement.

The next person stands up. “Hi, I’m Megan, and I went to a little school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before coming here to Warren University to get my master’s.” She winks, and points to her Harvard crew sweatshirt, just in case she was so coy that we didn’t know what she meant.

I’ve seen one-upmanship like this all throughout orientation, and it’s not that I don’t find it irritating; it’s just that I don’t have time to care. Of course, I want to grab some of these kids by the shoulders, tell them how ridiculous it is to debate whether Exeter is better than Andover when so many schools in the US—including the one I went to for K-8—are straining to afford books and basic supplies. But I can’t exactly do that.

If I want to carve out a piece of that golden pie for myself, and even more important, for my family, I know I need to operate in this world under their rules. In my notebook, I jot down a few things I could share, like my magnet school acceptance and the community service recognition I got at high school gradation. I stare down at the paper. Neither seems like enough.