Stanford University Top Questions

Grade inflation is pretty nice. It's pretty hard to do poorly in a class, but due to all the smart motivated people, it's also pretty hard to do super well. The nice thing about high school was when a teacher assigned a 300-page book to read, nobody did it. So if you read sparknotes you were way ahead of the curve. But at stanford, everyone does what they're supposed to do. Things are definitely much more competitive, but it's not too hard to do well if you put in effort.

One of the biggest determinants of how much I like a class is the size. I have a hard time engaging in courses where I am in a huge lecture and the professor has no idea who I am. I have loved my smaller classes, but I feel like it is often hard to find those as a freshman, which is when most students need that face-to-face interaction the most. Many of the math and science majors seem particularly bad about making lower level classes accessable and student-friendly.

You can get anything. You can take an awesome class, a terrible class, a big one, a small one. You may not even have to go to class because it could be recorded. There are lots of connections that can easily be made. I would say that you have to really try to find the eccentric classes and opportunities, but if you can find them, they are the best in the world without a doubt. I think the best thing about academics is that you can get some great classes, but when you pair it with the people you are at school with, and the random/cool/amazing things they know, your horizons just explode outward and you begin to pick up so much and learn about so many other ways of life.

It's hard, but if you're considering Stanford or already go in, you know that and you are prepared. The only difficulty is fixing your schedules, and you can get help with that (read, ical, a piece of paper, maybe an advisor or two).

Every quarter we have faculty night, when we can invite professors to come and eat dinner with us at the dining hall. This has been a positive experience, and the professors not only are the tops in their fields, but also they are charismatic lecturers and affable people. Students here talk at an entirely different level than anything I had ever experienced before. It's like all these brilliant people are put together in a small space and the conversations, no matter how trivial are held at such a high level that I never cease to be impressed.

The academics at Stanford definitely live up to the standards you would expect from a top university. The science and humanities classes all ask a lot from a person, especially as the quarter system is fast-paced. However, it's usually manageable. The unusual classes that I've taken so far are Jazz Theory, Air Pollution, Hacking Stuff (about building robot cars), Social Dance, and Breaking the Code (about codes). This is along with math, computer science, and required gen eds. Pretty much everyone has the time to take at least a couple classes "for fun" every year. Students are mostly competitive only around finals and midterms if they're in a class that grades on a curve, when it's actually important to do better than the person next to you.

Obviously, the academics at Stanford are great. One of my favorite aspects was the abroad program, which I think is generally well run. I did Stanford in Moscow and Stanford in Berlin, and I felt like the programs offered a nice balance of challenging academics and exposure to the culture and people of the city/country. And the Bing dinners and trips certainly don't hurt!

Professors at Stanford tend to view themselves as RESEARCHERS first, and teachers a distant third or fourth -- if at all. If you look at the Stanford's "Courses and Degrees", which is a catalog that lists the courses being offered for a particular school year, you will see that many classes are taught by "Staff". No, "Staff" is not the name of a professor, but a euphemism for "somebody who might be associated somehow to our department, such as a graduate student, and who may or may not have ever taught a class before, and who may or may not have any training in how to teach." Many of my classes were taught by Staff. I recently found out that the Staff instructor for an important core class, spanning two-quarters (20 weeks), had not even earned a Master's degree at the time he was teaching! He was a graduate student who only had a Bachelor's degree. He had practically zero teaching experience, and it showed. The poor quality of that class wasn't just my imagination, as that class has since been discontinued and is no longer offered, and that guy doesn't teach anymore anywhere in the world. But such vindication is small consolation. It was a waste of money and time that can never be recovered. Most professors don't grade papers, and leave it to the Teaching Assistants. This is like writing code without a computer in front of you, and never bothering to run the program on ANY computer. How do you know if your program works? How do the professors know if their teaching is any good? How many of Stanford's Nobel Prize winning faculty attended Stanford as an undergraduate? Most of the techie-Teaching Assistants didn't go to Stanford either. I had guys from Purdue, UCLA, Dartmouth, Amherst, U. of Maryland, U. of Texas, and of course, the ubiquitous University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Several profs got their undergrad degrees from Berkeley. If you really want to break it down - Stanford pays a bunch of professors a lot of money to do very little teaching. In fact, professors generally have to teach only one-quarter (10 weeks total) of classes a year. And each week, this often boils down to lectures that are 3 hours TOTAL all week, and a couple of office hours placed at the most inconvenient times. This means that students are paying professors to devote 20{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} of a typical 40-hour work week to undergraduate matters, with the remaining 80{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} left to their own discretion. And for many professors, this schedule is in effect for only about 10 weeks out of 52 weeks in a year … the remaining 80{4a082faed443b016e84c6ea63012b481c58f64867aa2dc62fff66e22ad7dff6c} is left to their discretion, such as doing research, consulting to other companies, doing lectures at other campuses, or running their own companies. (A rare handful of professors do teach for two quarters.) To add insult to injury, I had professors who skipped out on their office hours completely.

Academics are rough, especially if you're like me and you came into Stanford with a weak high school background. There are kids here from prep schools who breeze through intro classes, which can be intimidating. However, by sophomore year people usually find a niche and build their confidence in a particular discipline.

Academics at Stanford are generally solid though you can certainly find yourself in boring classes if you aren't careful. My favorite class I've taken so far was one offered between Anthropology and Urban Studies called 'Cities in Comparative Perspective'. The professor talked theory beautifully and students tended to have strong, interesting opinions. My least favorite classes are the big lecture classes (which you often have to take as pre-reqs for the more popular majors) where the professors sometimes fail to communicate effectively. Small classes and seminars are usually very good; I don't spend much time with professors outside of class, but they definitely learn your name, encourage you to come to office hours and remember you. Intellectual conversations outside of class are not frequent, but they do happen and no one's afraid to seem smart. People generally seem very relaxed about academics, no matter how stressed they are behind closed doors, and are generous with notes and collaboration. Special note should be made of the language programs; of the two I've taken, French and Portuguese, both were amazing.