D
Deleted member 16960
Rope nigger
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2022
- Posts
- 5,918
- Reputation
- 11,073
- Weather. This will always be near the top of the list, California weather is just waaaay better than anywhere else. (Obviously other CA schools get that as well.) You'd be surprised how much weather affects your mood, and having spring start in early February is pretty damn nice.
- Resources. Stanford is very invested in getting undergrads research opportunities in way that is I think somewhat uncommon. Probably MIT and other engineering schools are similar, but it'll be a differentiator with the big public schools.
- Atmosphere. This may have changed, but when I was there 10+ years ago it was extremely chill. I'm sure this varies based on friends groups and how amibitious you are, but I very much did NOT experience "duck syndrome" or anything like that. My memories now aren't things like cramming for tests or feeling under pressure, but stuff like bike rides to jump off the tower in the sailing lake (I forget the name) or organizing Floatopia on Lake Lag. Again, more recent grads talk about this differently, but I suspect it's largely a personality thing. If you want to take it (relatively) lightly and have fun, you can.
- Collaboration. This is actually from my gf who saw me writing this over my shoulder, but when she was touring grad schools every other place (MIT, UT Austin, Michigan, etc, basically she got into every top school in her field) talked about collaboration between departments, but relatively few people were doing it. Meanwhile at Stanford no one talked about it, but everyone was doing it. Again this info is somewhat old, but that type of culture things takes a while to break so it wouldn't surprise me if it were still true.
- Opportunities. There's nowhere better to be if you're going into CS. Maybe you can make an argument for MIT or Harvard but c'mon, Boston is not Silicon Valley. The opportunities available here are second to none. With other degrees this will vary somewhat (and if you're planning on doing grad school it doesn't matter as much), but it's pretty tough to be the perennially hot job market here, and the number of different fields the area leads in.
