Category:Famous Stanford Alumni
In 1891, at the age of seventeen, Herbert Hoover entered the inaugural class of the newly founded Leland Stanford Junior University in Palo Alto, California, studied geology under Professor John Casper Branner, met a fellow geology student named Lou Henry whom he would later marry, and went on to the presidency of the United States. The category collects biographical entries on people who studied at Stanford University, as undergraduates, as graduate students in its engineering and business schools, or at Stanford Law School. What distinguishes this particular roster from other university rosters on this wiki is how often two members of it founded a company together: the pairings, not the individuals, are the pattern.
Background
Stanford sits on former ranch land in Palo Alto, roughly thirty miles south of San Francisco, and its campus and the surrounding towns became the physical center of what is now called Silicon Valley. The university runs undergraduate programs alongside the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Law School, the Stanford University School of Medicine and a large engineering school, and members of this category arrive through all of them. Graduate study matters here more than it does at most schools in this inventory. A substantial share of the people below hold a Stanford master's degree, doctorate or MBA rather than a Stanford undergraduate degree, and several came to Palo Alto only after a first degree taken elsewhere or overseas.
The membership also reflects the university's position in California public life. State and federal officeholders from California appear in numbers that no other institution on this wiki matches, and so do judges, because Stanford Law School fed the appellate bench for decades before the technology industry began drawing graduates away from the professions.
Companies founded by classmates
The clearest signal in this roster is co-founders who met on campus. Jerry Yang and David Filo were graduate students together when they started Yahoo! in 1995; Yang later chaired the university's board of trustees. Sergey Brin enrolled in the computer science doctoral program in September 1993 and met Larry Page, who had entered the same program, and the PageRank algorithm that became Google was developed as part of Page's research at the university. Bobby Murphy created Snapchat with Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown while all three were students, launching it in 2011. Kevin Systrom founded Instagram with Mike Krieger, another Stanford graduate, who had come from Brazil for his undergraduate and master's degrees.
The pattern predates the internet. Sun Microsystems, co-founded by Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla, took its name from the Stanford University Network, the campus computing project whose technology the company commercialized. Phil Knight wrote the business school paper that proposed importing high quality running shoes from Japan, the idea that became Nike. Ken Howery worked on The Stanford Review, the student newspaper Peter Thiel had founded in 1987, before the two of them co-founded PayPal.
Later arrivals came for a specific degree rather than a co-founder. Jensen Huang took a master's in electrical engineering, Sundar Pichai and Reed Hastings took master's degrees, Parag Agrawal took both a master's and a doctorate in computer science, and Tony Xu and Katrina Lake came through the business school. Andrej Karpathy did his graduate work under Fei-Fei Li and taught the university's course on convolutional neural networks before joining the industry. Scott Forstall studied computer science here and went to NeXT; Brian Acton took a computer science degree and later co-founded WhatsApp; Vlad Tenev read mathematics before co-founding Robinhood.
Law, the bench and California politics
Sandra Day O'Connor read economics as an undergraduate and stayed for the law school, at a time when very few women were pursuing legal education, before becoming the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. William Rehnquist graduated from the same law school and clerked for Justice Robert H. Jackson on his way to the chief justiceship. Stephen Breyer took his bachelor's degree here before Oxford and Harvard Law. Warren Christopher earned his law degree at Stanford, clerked at the Supreme Court and served as the 63rd United States Secretary of State.
The elected officials in this category are disproportionately Californian. Dianne Feinstein and Zoe Lofgren both took bachelor's degrees here; Xavier Becerra took both his bachelor's degree and his law degree; Ted Lieu took two undergraduate degrees, one of them in computer science, which he has drawn on as a congressional voice on technology policy. Adam Schiff read for his bachelor's degree here before Harvard Law. Outside California, Cory Booker was active in student life here before entering New Jersey politics, Josh Hawley graduated in 2002, and Michael Tubbs went from an undergraduate degree here to the mayoralty of Stockton.
Graduate school, the sciences and other people's universities
Stanford's doctoral and professional programs account for most of the laureates and academics in this roster rather than its undergraduate college. John Harsanyi took his doctorate here before his work on Bayesian games; Oliver Williamson took his MBA here before the work on the economics of organizations; Barry Sharpless did his graduate work here before the chemistry that would carry two Nobel Prizes; Peter Sarnak completed a doctorate in 1980 under Paul Cohen with a dissertation on prime geodesic theorems, and went on to supervise doctorates of his own at Princeton.
A smaller cluster ended up running other universities. Claudine Gay studied here and served on the faculty from 2000 to 2006 before becoming the 30th president of Harvard; Alan Garber took his medical degree here and spent much of his academic career at Stanford before returning to Harvard as provost and then as its 31st president; Peter Salovey took a bachelor's and a master's degree here before the presidency of Yale; Mung Chiang took all three of his degrees here before the presidency of Purdue. John Donahoe came back to the university as its athletic director after running eBay and Nike.
International members reached Palo Alto by a different route again. Rishi Sunak took an MBA here and met his wife on campus before entering British politics and, eventually, Downing Street. Azim Premji was twenty-one and studying engineering here when he was called home to India to take over the family firm that became Wipro. Carly Fiorina read medieval history and philosophy as an undergraduate before an entirely different career in technology, Tiger Woods enrolled in 1994 on a golf scholarship, Rachel Maddow took a public policy degree before a doctorate at Oxford, Issa Rae worked in campus theatre, Atul Gawande took two bachelor's degrees, and Susan Rice read history and was later inducted into the university's Black Alumni Hall of Fame.
See also
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