robertgfthomas

Party on the Outside, Business on the Inside

Stanford has lots of good points: the beautiful campus, the talented student body, and opportunities of every shape and kind presenting themselves in abundance. I know lots of people who were extremely happy at Stanford. I wasn't one of them. I went there imagining the campus was full of people who were smart and ambitious, but also very outgoing and confident. Turns out, for the most part, only the first half was true. I don't think it's ever healthy to expect any place to be where you'll finally "fit in."

All the students at Stanford have extremely good intentions. However, other reviewers have mentioned the "Duck Syndrome," by which students tend to look a lot happier than they actually are. Being unhappy is uncool. Also, while it's great on the one hand that there's so much entrepreneurial spirit at Stanford, I think it's a result of students not necessarily knowing how to interact well with others. There are lots of leaders, and very few followers -- although since everyone's a leader, everyone ends up looking kind of the same and following the same trends.

I had some great classes at Stanford, and some really pretty dreadful classes. I strongly recommend Stanford if you're the type of person who learns best in a classroom environment. If scholarship is truly your passion, then it's a fantastic school. It took going to Stanford for me to realize that I learn best by DOING. Stanford teaches very, very few "skills," other than reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. I would have loved more classes on personal finance, or how to fix a car, or even classes on applied Drama and Film rather than just, "let's read a bunch of plays and then write essays about them!" But as a research institution, that's really not Stanford's function.

Long story short, just because a school's your dream school does not mean going there will be a dream. I ended up leaving Stanford because I had a 3.7 GPA, but didn't feel like I'd learned anything; I was just really good at taking tests. That said, I met some truly wonderful people there, and some very happy people there. And I'm happy to say that while the university as a whole is a bit resistant to change, the administration is for the most part very willing to talk about it.