<p>I attended the Stanford information session in my town this evening. It was in the same downtown Minneapolis hotel where I first saw a Stanford information session three years ago. Traffic was good tonight, so I arrived quite early and saw admission officer Julia Rose Ando as she was setting up the table outside the meeting room with brochures and bookmarks. She remembered my son (a student in the pioneer class of Stanford's EPGY Online High School, as she remarked) and me from our attendance at the Exploring College Options program in May at another Twin Cities hotel. As I greeted her a passerby mentioned the Stanford-USC football game played last Sunday, on which I congratulated her. As other people came up to the table in the next half hour she seemed to remember many of them or their names from high school meetings or receiving emails, so she seems to have a good memory for people interested in Stanford. </p>
<p>The music in the main meeting room was MUCH better than the music I heard three weeks ago at a different hotel before the Caltech meeting. It was well performed Romantic era solo piano pieces, most of them familiar to me because my wife is a piano teacher. The meeting began with Ms. Ando turning off the beautiful music, which was a good attention-getter in that large room. Then she surprised me by saying that the music was not professional recording artists, but current Stanford students. There must be some very good musicians among the newly enrolled students at Stanford. </p>
<p>This year's meeting was more lightly attended than the meeting I saw three years ago. Ms. Ando gave a very articulate opening talk, beginning with giving Stanford's history. Stanford was founded in 1891 and subsequent President Herbert Hoover was in the pioneer class. The university is named after the son of Leland Stanford, the railroad tycoon, who died young. Mr. and Mrs. Stanford wanted the university to be a memorial to their son, so the university's official name is Leland Stanford Junior University, but usually it's just called Stanford. [In other places, I have heard various jokes made that Stanford is a "JUNIOR" university, just an overgrown junior college, but of course that is said by alumni of other colleges.] The most common informal name for Stanford is "The Farm," because the campus is formed of what was originally the Stanford family farm, consisting of 8100 acres of land. </p>
<p>From the beginning Stanford has been co-educational, open to people from all backgrounds. It was originally tuition-free. It has students from every state and all over the world. </p>
<p>Stanford's quarter system means students can choose 50 percent more different classes over the course of a college career than students at a semester-system college. It's like getting fifteen weeks (my notes say "eighteen weeks" were Ms. Ando's words) of subject study in ten weeks. </p>
<p>Students declare their majors at the end of sophomore year. Stanford has many unique majors; students are well advised to attend lots of different classes to discover interests. Listing your major choice as "undecided" is a good thing in the eyes of the admission office--there are many possible majors at Stanford. </p>
<p>Stanford has overseas campuses, usually offering home-stay programs, so those can have language prerequisites. </p>
<p>There are 6,500 undergraduates on campus, making Stanford medium-sized among research universities. 1,650 new students are admitted each year. There are fewer than 20 students in a typical class. The student:faculty ratio is 7:1; the student:bicycle ratio is 7:6, because bicycles are a great way to get around on the large campus. Introductory seminar courses are capped at 16 students. They are offered in many interesting subjects. </p>
<p>There are interdisciplinary courses. The physics of photography course is taught by a Nobel laureate, and students take photos, develop them, and learn about the science and history of photography. There are also interdisciplinary majors. The most popular major on campus is human biology, known at Stanford as Hum Bio, a course combining biology, anthropology, sociology, and chemistry, and a very popular major for students who want to study medicine. There is even a themed dorm for Hum Bio. Another Stanford interdisciplinary major is symbolic systems, an appropriate major for Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley grew up near Stanford because Stanford alumni founded many high-tech companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Google, and YouTube. </p>
<p>Stanford is a collaborative place. Stanford looks for students who are excited and passionate about learning. Stanford wants undergraduates to do research, and budgets $4 million per year so that undergraduates can do research in any discipline. </p>
<p>We were the first Minnesota audience to see the new Stanford admissions video. The slickly produced video showed students from all over, including a girl from northern Minnesota, and lots of first-generation immigrants (shown with both their birth hometown and hometown at time of application). The video scenes showed Stanford's famous and bizarre marching band, lots of athletics, various performers and musical groups, and undergraduates working in labs. A professor said Stanford is "not as locked into tradition" as some east coast colleges, and another said the students "don't hoard knowledge; they share it." </p>
<p>A panel of three young alumni introduced themselves after the video. Carter Dunn, who has both B.S. and M.S. ('04) degrees from Stanford, said he was in the engineering program in Japan. He noted that Stanford also has an overseas engineering program in Berlin, and the students who go to those programs come back with much improved proficiency in Japanese or German, because they live with local families. Stanford even finds those students internships while they are overseas. </p>
<p>An alumna, whose name may not be spelled correctly in my notes, is now a graduate student at the U of Minnesota. She is originally from Madison, WI, so she knows the upper Midwest. She is a graduate of the small systems program. She rowed crew and played ultimate Frisbee while at Stanford, and studied in Santiago, Chile for a quarter. </p>
<p>A third Stanford graduate was an alumna who grew up in Minneapolis and Golden Valley, MN. She has a B.A. ('03) and M.A. ('04) degree from Stanford. She sang in an acapella group that performed jazz and hip-hop music, and was a senator in Stanford's student government. She played rugby for a week, but discontinued that after injuries. She spent a summer in Greece while she was a student. </p>
<p>After the panel introductions, there was Q and A. </p>
<p>Parent: Please tell us about the quarter system.
Alumna: I loved the quarter system because of the greater diversity of classes. It's intense. It's maybe not like fifteen weeks in ten, but you start the class and right away begin preparing for tests. </p>
<p>Parent: What about core requirements in classes?
A: There are some required classes in English, and a required introduction to the humanities (IHUM) course, which is not always a course a student wants to take. There is writing class for a year. There is also a year of required math and science, and one alumna noted that she took a very introductory computer science department course that was largely building webpages to fulfill part of that requirement. Ms. Ando noted that one can test out of some core requirements with AP tests. </p>
<p>Student: How is the housing?
A: It's spectacular, and it's guaranteed for four years. The alumnus said he had been in every which kind of housing, including staying in a frat house without being a member of the frat, and living in a co-op housing community, which he described as a very good experience. One alumna said that she got what she thought would be a bad choice one year when her housing assignment priority was low, namely the Asian-American theme house, an older dorm with double rooms, but she ended up liking the cultural experiences there. </p>
<p>We then left the meeting because of a schedule conflict. I like the Stanford meetings a lot. I'd love to hear what you hear at any meeting you attend.</p>