Then meet (and brownnose) the faculty.

David Beach

Beach is the longtime leader of the cutting-edge Product Realization Lab, which is basically MythBusters on steroids. In 2011, Beach told The Stanford Daily that about 40 percent of the engineering staff at Tesla were PRL alums. “His top students and his favorites got introductions or really plum jobs at Apple hardware or other design studios like Ideo,” a mechanical-engineering major from the class of ’16 said.

Mehran Sahami

Widely known by his first name, Sahami is beloved and famous primarily as the fall-semester teacher for CS 106A, the most widely taken class in the entire university. He has also, on rare occasions, invested in student companies; maybe the one black eye on his reputation is that he invested in Clinkle, a start-up launched by a student of his that became an embodiment of the failures of start-up culture. According to one student, “A vote of approval from [Mehran] means a lot to other people who wouldn’t be willing to give you money or invest in you or take you seriously.”

Don Knuth

A legend in computer science who’s often called the “Yoda of Silicon Valley” and the author of the ongoing book project The Art of Computer Programming, Knuth has won basically every accolade in the field, including the Turing Award. If you’re a real CS academic nerd and think you know your stuff, Knuth gives a cash reward of $2.56 (one hexadecimal dollar) to anyone who finds a mistake in one of his books. “People talked about getting one of those checks as if it was computer science’s Nobel Prize,” one student said.

Tina Seelig

Seelig wears many hats across the university. As a longtime shepherd of elite tech-management training programs like the Mayfield Fellowship, Seelig may have a bigger network in the Valley than just about anyone at Stanford.