Stanford, Harvard, or Yale???

aleaiactaest
Thu, 09 Apr 2015 03:21:43 +0000

@Planner‌ You should read these if you haven’t already:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/want-a-job-in-silicon-valley-after-yale-good-luck-with-that

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2895102/cringely/tech-startups-to-yale-grads-go-to-a-real-school.html

Know that if your son comes to Stanford, he 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. 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.

Sorry, that was a bit disjointed. Please let me know if you have any questions or if i can clarify anything.