“How’s it going?” “Good.” And so ends another conversation. In our modern society (at least in the United States), we’ve become accustomed to little pleasantries throughout the day, offering mechanical responses to superficial questions. In other words, we habitually engage in “small talk.” What, then, is Big Talk? Started by Kalina Silverman, Big Talk attempts … More Big Talk, Small Talk
I’ve been thinking a lot about management lately. As a student in MS&E280: Organizational Behavior (taught by the legendary Bob Sutton), class discussions use empirical evidence and case studies to think about what we consider to be “good” management or “bad” management, incredible organizations versus organizations in flux. It seems to me that a lot … More Management Lessons from Trader Joe’s
During my final year at Stanford, I’ve been selected to be an ECON1 TA (which is relatively rare for a non-Econ Ph.D. student). ECON1 is the introductory economics course at Stanford, and it’s a course I’ve always wanted to help teach. By the end of 10 weeks, students gain a foundational understanding of microeconomics and … More ECON1 in the Real World
Stanford guarantees four years of on-campus housing, a really great perk given how expensive the surrounding area is: homes in Palo Alto sell for a median price of $3.3 million, and rent can be just as exorbitant. For people who return to campus for additional years (in my case, a 5th year to finish my … More The Stanford Student’s Guide to Renting in the Bay Area
Over the past few months, I’ve been following the “scooter wars” raging on in SF as part of a very interesting class on the sharing economy I took at Stanford. Several scooter companies have emerged across major metropolitan areas in the United States, offering electric scooters for people to zip around on. San Francisco has … More SF Scooter Wars
This quarter, I decided to take CS106B at Stanford. A step above its popular counterpart, CS106A, this class dives more deeply into programming through the C++ language, covering more abstract data types (ADTs), recursion, binary search trees, graphs, and inheritance. After a three-year-long hiatus between taking CS106A, my style starting off was a little … More Bugs in the Code
A couple weeks ago, I had the fortune of attending the inaugural Cardinal Conversations event at Stanford University. Cardinal Conversations is a series of talks designed to pair speakers with diverse views on specific topics, and engage in a dialogue encompassing the multifaceted beliefs and actions within these topics. The first event featured two Silicon … More Respectful Dialogue in a Polarized World
One class I’m taking this quarter is ECON137: Decision Modeling and Information. Taught by the legendary Scott McKeon, this class focuses on the deterministic side of Economics – given some information, figure out the right decision a person should make. With this decision analysis comes a philosophical quandary: should we as a society reward … More Do you applaud the decision or the outcome?
This quarter, I was fortunate enough to be accepted into MS&E277: Creativity and Innovation, which is co-taught by Tina Seelig (godmother of the D.School), and Richard Cox (who also teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business). One our first assignments was to try the famous “Paperclip challenge,” popularized when one guy managed to trade … More Lessons from the Paperclip Challenge
For the past two weeks, I’ve had the incredible opportunity to go on tour to Mexico and Cuba as a violinist in the Stanford Symphony Orchestra. One thing that stood out to me during my weeklong stay in Cuba was how entrepreneurial the Cuban people I met along the way could be. Even more impressive … More Cubans do Entrepreneurship Better than Silicon Valley
Andrew Jabara 