Ballroom Dancing

Some of the best networking opportunities come from less obvious clubs. “When there’s a sufficient number of tech-oriented people in basically any Stanford organization, it can become a self-reinforcing pipeline by accident,” says Jonathon Yu, class of ’18. Take the

Viennese Ball, for example. There is nothing special about a ballroom-dance group in particular that guarantees entry to tech, and yet: “The generation before me, a very large percentage of people went to work for Facebook, and this is before Facebook went public, because some previous members of the [dance] group had gone to work at Facebook, so they offered referrals … [The ball] just helps you make sure that you’re not going to get ignored when you cold-apply. One group of people from the dance is this subset of five or six people who now all work on the self-driving car at Tesla, which, considering that’s probably only 40 or 50 people, is a large subset of their AI team.”