Stanford and Pomona

aleaiactaest
Fri, 10 Apr 2015 03:42:44 +0000

1. Know that if you come to Stanford, you will have an unparalleled direct pipeline to Silicon Valley.

Freshman year, I took CS106A, which is Stanford’s famous intro CS course. The professor, Mehran Sahami, was among the first employees at Google (originally google.stanford.edu; as I type this, I am sitting next to the Lego box that Larry Page and Sergey Bring used to store one of Google’s initial servers) and is responsible for Gmail’s spam filter. The last class of the quarter was taught by Mark Zuckerberg. Eric Roberts, my professor for CS106B, helped Bill Gates and Paul Allen start Microsoft when he was a PhD student in Applied Math at Harvard and was the primary mentor for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (also a Stanford grad). Julie Zelenski, my CS107 lecturer, worked very closely with Steve Jobs first at NEXT and later at Apple. Jerry Cain, my CS110 lecturer, invented Facebook’s “Like” button. Don Knuth, the father of modern computer science, is an emeritus professor in the Stanford CS department. You could name almost anyone who helped establish the field of modern computer science, and I could likely stand up from my current seat and take a short walk to that person’s office. Being a CS student at Stanford is like being a geometer living in the time of Euclid: you can go talk to the people who invented major portions of your field.

One of my primary non-academic engagements is being a section leader for the CS106s (A, B, and X). All undergrads can apply to do this once they’ve completed CS106B. There are numerous companies that hire interns and full-timers directly off of the list of section leaders. My CS106B section leader guaranteed that my resume would be closely reviewed by a recruiter at Twitter (instead of being thrown in a pile of emails with all the other resumes), where he worked the summer prior to having me in section. In short, connections like these that a person makes at Stanford are invaluable. As a Stanford CS student at a career fair, many companies are actually competing for you.

2. I cannot speak to a comparison between the semester system and the quarter system, as I go to Stanford and therefore have never experienced the semester system. To your concern about “leaving time for out-of-school activities/learning,” I can say that many Stanford students devote about as much time to their extracurriculars as they do to their schoolwork. Most people here definitely don’t do school work all of the time. As Stanford President John Hennessy has said, it is a very “work hard, play hard” kind of environment.

3. I have never witnessed any form of outwardly-expressed, interpersonally competitive behavior as an undergraduate at Stanford. In fact, I would go so far as to say that such behavior is frowned upon here.

You can read about my personal experiences at Stanford elsewhere on this forum.