Stanford University: Fill & Download for Free

A lot of these good answers focus on the experience of attending Stanford (ie is it easy or hard or are the people impressive, etc), but I would like to add one other thing that I think is truly unique about the place -- it's entrepreneurial DNA at the core of its culture.People talk about Terman and HP and Jim Gibbons and all of the heroes who helped put Stanford on the map as ground zero for Silicon Valley. All of these stories are true and important as well....but I think that the cultural DNA was set even before.The roots of Stanford can be traced to Leland Stanford, who came of age during the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush had a special ethos to it: If you were in a river in 1849 panning for gold and the person next to you fished out a huge rock of it, you started to develop an outlook that anyone could be prosperous: the key was to take a risk, believe it could happen, work hard, and show up.I went to Stanford hoping to become a good engineer: But it was obvious to me soon after arrival that this place was different....if you had an idea for a startup company, there were professors who would encourage you to drop out and try it. You could always come back. If you took a class on entrepreneurship, you would have guest lecturers like Scott McNealy, Nolan Bushnell, Adam Osbourne, Bill Campbell, Steve Jobs, Jim Clark...it was just unbelievable. And seeing people up close like this had a way of making the process of being a massively successful founder feel more real and attainable. If they could fish that rock of gold out of the river, heck...maybe others could too.So my experience with Stanford was more than that of attending a world-class academic institution...It also was a place where the default assumption was to be idealistic and willing to take risk. Rather than use intellectual horsepower to explain why something would not work, the bias was to say "what if it can work?" Rather than a culture exclusively devoted to sheer academic rigor, there was a complementary culture that celebrated the importance of intelligent risk...it was a culture that changed my life.I wish more academic institutions would do a better job of helping students understand the value of taking intelligent risks. This in my view is fundamental in going from understanding the world to actually improving it. Lots of schools are trying to create this type of culture in more recent times, but Stanford delivers this as part of its experience better than any in my opinion.And the weather wasn't too bad either :-)

There are 27,000+ trees on the campus. That’s 3 trees for every grad student: While one is a barely-moving perennial structure which consumes water and sunlight all day, the others are trees. :POur motto is “Die Luft der Freiheit weht” which translates to “The wind of freedom blows”.. and so does our unofficial mascot, amirite? (Sorry)There are an estimated 13,000+ bikes on campus daily. Biking is fun! It’s the most fun thing which most of us have between our legs.. Wait.If Stanford grads formed their own country, it would have one of the world’s 10 largest economies.Our collection of Rodin sculptures is among the largest in the world, including The Gates of Hell, on which Rodin worked for two decades, almost as long as a Stanford PhD takes.

The average student does not get into Stanford. The 25th percentile SAT reading score is 690, and the math score is 700, which is well above average (>90th percentile).If you don’t fit that profile, you may be able to get in by being a particularly interesting person, but bear in mind that there are many interesting applicants who also have high grades and SAT scores.