<p>This is similar to the " What's not so great about Harvard?" thread, so I figured I'd start one for Stanford. Post away...</p>
<p>Sometimes it rains.</p>
<p>If you aren’t careful, you can get sunburned.</p>
<p>The dorm rooms are just simple cubes. By comparison, go to Harvard and you have (at least among the “River Houses”) two person rooms off a corridor where, once inside, you have your own internal room corridor, a private path (yes, just for two!), each person has his/her own room, and (just for you two!) a large common room with a fireplace.</p>
<p>Really, compared to that standard, Stanford is just your garden-variety dorm room with two kids and a bed and a desk. Their dorms there could have been built on any state college campus anywhere. It is a real downer.</p>
<p>The quality of rooms varies by dorm. I agree that most of the freshman housing is poor, but many of the others are not. In all but my freshmen year at Stanford, I had my own room, separate from my roommate. I don’t recall seeing any fireplaces, but there are few days you’d want one on in a climate where it gets into the 60s most winter days. </p>
<p>I am a big fan of Stanford. It was my first choice, and I truly believe it was the best college in the world for me. That said, there are some negatives. Some that come to mind are:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>It’s difficult to get accepted to the school. This year it had the lowest acceptance rate of all academic colleges (the only one lower was a school of music). Some disagree with their acceptance criteria, such as diversity policies.</p></li>
<li><p>The sticker price is very expensive. However, most students get some form of financial aid. They are very generous with aid, offering no tuition to most families making under 100k/yr and no tuition, room & board or books to most families making under 60k/yr.</p></li>
<li><p>Most persons I knew at Stanford highly recommended the school to all their siblings and friends that were accepted, but a few did not. When they did not, they always gave the same reason – the difficulty in the work and maintaining the high grades they were used to . One used the phrase “struggling to keep our heads above water.” Most of the students at the school are used to getting all A’s. Some have never gotten a B in their life. However, some classes are curved such that the average grade is a B. I had one chem class that may have been set up to weed out pre-med students with average test grades sometimes in the 30s and curved to a low B. This resulted in students studying ridiculous amounts for this class and some panicking. Soon after the first big tests in freshmen year, they had counsellors come to my dorm to support students who had trouble coping with getting their first Bs and Cs. I know many students whose lower undergrad grades kept them from getting into the grad school or med school they had hoped for. However, Stanford is probably no worse in this respect than other HYPM schools. If you want to get almost all As, there are ways to do so.</p></li>
<li><p>Some don’t like the Palo Alto atmosphere. It’s a small town that’s highly focused on tech companies, especially tech startups (because of the Stanford influence). This results in an extremely high cost of living. Basic homes can cost 7 figures. It can make living off campus expensive. Palo Alto also is not known for having a lot of college party-type activities, like bars and clubs. Instead one might need to go to SF or SJ.</p></li>
<li><p>It’s a big campus where most students bike to classes. Bike theft is not uncommon. If students don’t bike, they’ll probably have to walk relatively long distances. Some don’t like this. And persons who are out of shape will be in the small minority. Parking is limited and can be expensive.</p></li>
<li><p>While very well known on the west coast, I don’t think the Stanford name carries the same prestige as HYP on the east coast. I’m from upstate NY. When I said I was going to Stanford, some people thought I was talking about Stamford, Connecticut. I doubt that would have happened if I said Harvard. </p></li>
<li><p>As mentioned earlier, some of the dorms are unimpressive. And many are not a fan of housing being assigned by the draw. The draw basically involves drawing a random number. Each dorm has a different cutoff. The lower the number, the more likely you are to get into one of your desired dorms.</p></li>
<li><p>Some don’t like the quarter system. In one quarter you are often covering the material that other schools do in a semester.</p></li>
<li><p>While most class sizes are small, they have some freshmen foundation classes with 100+ students. I didn’t mind these larger classes because they would be broken off into smaller groups with a TAs afterwards for individual attention and questions. I’d much rather get the opportunity to hear an inspirational lecture from a well known expert in the field who wrote the textbook than have it being split up into a bunch of smaller classes, with most run by less experienced persons.</p></li>
<li><p>Some students complain that there isn’t enough of a party atmosphere.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Data10 has some great points that I (and most students) would agree with. To that excellent overview, I’d like to add that there is subtle pressure among the student body to be happy all the time, and to “do it all” while still making it look effortless. This is known as the Stanford duck syndrome - the students all look like calm, happy ducks on the surface but are paddling frantically below to stay afloat - and is infamous on campus. Sometimes you can be floundering and feel like you’re all alone, because it seems like everyone around you has it all together. If this intrigues you, you’ll hear a lot about it during NSO and throughout the rest of your career, so much so you might get sick of it, but it’s 100% true. The Stanford name can be a lot to live up to, both during your college career and afterward, as is the expectation to appear calm, cool, and collected while trying to be a superhero. Is it difficult? Sometimes, yes. But is it something you’ll find at Stanford and other schools of this caliber simply by nature of their student bodies? Most likely.</p>
<p>This is going to sound like a weird question, but I’ll ask anyways: how much homework/studying to you get and what’s your GPA. You don’t have to answer- I’m just curious.</p>
<p>Most classes are graded on a curve, at least during freshman year. So one person’s GPA means almost nothing.</p>
<p>The quarter system is not ideal for getting internships with set start and end dates which never correspond to Stanford’s calendar, or for finding cheap sublets in other cities for the same reason–other colleges get out in May, not June, and start in August, note late September. That said, the Stanford calendar works well for athletes since they are still in school the whole time they are competing. At other colleges, the athletes have to stay on after everyone else has gone home for the summer. For example, in my daughter’s sport, the national championship meet will be held in two weeks. Other schools will have been out 3 or 4 weeks already–not Stanford.</p>
<p>A lot of undergrads at S would not agree with this but from from an objective viewpoint it’s pretty clear that, like most research universities, undergrads are a necessary evil here. Now, it’s not as bad at S as it is at Cal, where undergrads are really given short shrift and limited access to many of the opportunities and support grad students enjoy. It’s more subtle at Stanford but it’s still there. They do a very good job at Stanford of making it seem that all opportunities are available to undergrads but that’s just not the case, e.g. take a look at the labs in ChemE or Bio and notice that there are a few token undergrads involved but most of the positions are grads or post doc. Certainly it varies from department to department and maybe typical of a bigger school but I think S can do better. There are other smaller schools, and some like Princeton, that really emphasize the attention they give to the undergrad population, but with more grad students than undergrad it’s something you should be aware of if you plan to attend Stanford.</p>
<p>SunDiego, have you had any trouble getting into labs yourself? I’m asking because I have personally found the research opportunities here very abundant, and so have all of my friends, including those in bio and other sciences. There are even more opportunities available in labs during the summer, so if that is an option for you maybe you can look into those. Obviously, research labs are going to be heavily populated with grad students, post-docs, etc. since this is a leading R1 university, but in my experience most professors are very welcoming to undergrads.</p>
<p>It’s not the oldest, richest, and most reputable university in the world: HARVARD!</p>
<p>Harvard is also not the oldest university in the world. It’s not even in the top 50. For example, Oxford is ~600 years older than Harvard (exact number varies depending on how you you count periods of inactivity). Harvard is also far from the most reputable university in technology-related fields, such as engineering and CS.</p>
<p>It’s not as strong in the creative or fine arts, and Palo Alto is a wealthy suburban town that does not offer much for college students.</p>
<p>Contrary to myth, the arts are thriving just fine here–beautiful Cantor Arts Center, state of the art Bing Concert Hall featuring world class musicians, gorgeous Memorial Church for Stanford Chorale and tons of other performances, amazing dance troupes featuring dance styles from all over the world, lots of student-produced plays, extensive offerings in courses in music and fine arts, etc. etc. And, Stanford is in the the process of pouring millions of dollars into expanding the offerings and resources further.</p>
<p>Palo Alto is a wealthy town all right. Not sure that’s a negative, and there are actually lots of decent places to eat right off campus that aren’t that expensive. Stanford itself offers so much for its students that the town doesn’t really need to. I do go to SF a couple of weekends per quarter for a hit of urban cool–always awesome. But it’s also always great to get back to campus.</p>
<p>It looks like that it is impossible to get in now.</p>
<p>I was a Harvard undergraduate and am now a Stanford graduate student. Both schools have pros and cons. Here is what I don’t like about Stanford …</p>
<p>1) Palo Alto is a terrible place to be a student. While it’s a very nice place to live, it is not a college town at all. The cost of living is exorbitant, nightlife is a joke, and very few businesses cater to students. </p>
<p>2) The campus is a bubble. Students rarely leave and I think as a result people graduate from Stanford having very little idea of how the real world works. Being in Boston, Harvard did a much better job of this, since it was so common to mingle with students from other universities and with the population of the city.</p>
<p>3) Despite being such a great school, Stanford does not have an intellectual vibe. In general, discussions are about starting companies and earning money, not about philosophy, literature, and ancient history.</p>
<p>^^Sorry to disagree with you…but you having done your undergraduate work at H brings a certain BIAS to this discussion. Almost “every” individual who studied at schools SHYPCCCM as a “college” student think they had a more “intellectual experience” than someone from another institution…I should know. Many from my undergraduate college tell me how “inferior” the students at their respective graduate schools are whether it be medical school, law school, business school, or PhD programs…in respect to the “college” students there…that’s just how human nature/mind works…</p>
<p>…for perspective, I attended graduate school at another TOP rival school (see above)…and I, like many, thought I was attending “plumbing school” (no disrespect to professional plumbers) with very little intellectual discussions…but, when you are basically surrounded by graduate students who know exactly what they want to do with their lives…they become more practical and utilitarian…that’s just how it works…as you get closer to getting out into the “real world”…and you also get limited exposure to the undergrads…so one can’t really have a fair assessment/nor can you fairly judge them either (since you yourself are got going through what they are at THIS school)…</p>
<p>…trust me, if you had attended Stanford as an undergrad, you would be saying the same thing about Harvard undergrads…</p>
<p>…even I, as a parent, with 2 children at SHYP schools have come to appreciate that each individual school provides the right “intellectual vibe” for each child that chose it. There is no right or wrong answer here…I should know what I’m talking about since everyone thinks my alma mater has the MOST intellectual VIBE.</p>
<p>"It’s not the oldest, richest, and most reputable university in the world: HARVARD! "</p>
<p>Of Course. Ignorance is also bliss. 
</p>
<p>RCMAN13 </p>
<ol>
<li> I would think Boston would be the same costwise if you were a graduate student there that you did not experience. Someone I know since their childhood started residency at MGH last year and mentioned paying $3000 a month for a 600 sq ft studio.</li>
</ol>
<p>2 and 3 seem to conflict. Either they are in a bubble or they are gungho about starting companies and making money. I know about 20 or so rising sophomores at the moment and ALL of them are doing something in the real world during summer. Just because they don’t leave campus during the school year does not mean they are not doing anything in summers to see the real world.</p>
<p>In terms of what the student body is like, is there a lot of diversity at Stanford?</p>