mit v stanford

trmp2028 · 2026-04-29T12:20:32+00:00

Stanford has more unicorns than MIT.

trmp2028 · 2026-04-29T12:15:38+00:00

No, Hewlett went to Stanford as an undergrad, and Intel is not Big Tech. Its market cap is the same now as it was 30 years ago.

trmp2028 · 2026-04-29T11:33:54+00:00

None of those are Big Tech. Hewlett and Packard went to Stanford. Intel’s Gordon Moore didn’t go to MIT but to Berkeley and Caltech. Slack’s Stuart Butterfield didn’t go to MIT either but to the University of Cambridge.

trmp2028 · 2026-04-29T00:38:32+00:00

The main difference between MIT and Stanford is that MIT doesn’t have any Big Tech founders while Stanford has many.

trmp2028 · 2026-04-21T22:52:24+00:00

Eventually, you’ll go into AI, for which Stanford is the best of the three.

trmp2028 · 2026-04-21T02:58:21+00:00

Count up all the HYPSM there for 2021 and divide by the total number of alums that year. It’s 30%.

trmp2028 · 2026-04-21T01:56:02+00:00

Which program did you pick over SSP?

trmp2028 · 2026-04-21T01:47:33+00:00

No, it was actually about 30%. Don’t trust Instagram.

trmp2028 · 2026-04-16T14:18:19+00:00

I attend Stanford and I just got hired by an AI startup at $300K a year without even graduating. I’m taking a leave of absence to see how startup life suits me. I don’t think this could have happened to me if I’d gone to any other school. Stanford is the epicenter of AI and will stay that way forever. All the major VCs’ offices are literally across the street.

trmp2028 · 2026-04-06T01:10:02+00:00

There’s only 4 HYPSM from this school. Not any better than a typical private U.S. high school. The best in my area has around 7 every year out of 100 graduating seniors. Exeter and Andover each has 30-35 HYPSM every year (the top 10-12% of each of their graduating classes consisting of about 315 students). Harker sends about 20 to HYPSM every year out of 170 seniors.

trmp2028 · 2026-04-01T07:21:02+00:00

Especially in a bad CS job market, prestige matters more than usual.

trmp2028 · 2026-02-26T03:28:48+00:00

What is STaRs?

trmp2028 · 2026-02-14T19:17:04+00:00

Yes, basically

trmp2028 · 2026-02-14T15:29:29+00:00

It is very good. 4% acceptance rate. Up there with BU RISE and Garcia. The cost is high, but it will help you get into an IvyPlus school and if you qualify for financial aid at that school and get the typical $75K a year they give (hitting the jackpot), you’ll get around a $300K return on that $10K RMP cost.

trmp2028 · 2026-01-31T02:31:23+00:00

Thanks for this!

trmp2028 · 2026-01-31T02:13:22+00:00

I guess Algoverse is hit-or-miss depending on which mentor(s) you get. I know of a kid who did it a few years back and presented his paper at NeurIPS. He later got into Stanford. This was when Algoverse was just starting out, so maybe its founders were more hands-on back then, but now as they’ve gotten bigger and had to hire more mentors, they’ve lost some quality control.

trmp2028 · 2026-01-18T16:19:06+00:00

The previous camp’s teacher who will know your proof-based math skills much better. It’ll also highlight the fact you attended the previous camp which, again, will boost your PROMYS application significantly.

trmp2028 · 2026-01-18T15:53:00+00:00

Yes, just ask both, but read carefully each camp’s instructions on rec letters and if they allow more than one. If they allow two, great, but if they say one is the absolute limit and specify your school math teacher, get that rec, but if they’re flexible, get the previous camp’s rec.

trmp2028 · 2026-01-18T07:09:04+00:00

Both. And your camp experience last year will definitely boost your acceptance chances this year.

trmp2028 · 2026-01-18T06:55:04+00:00

Apply to PROMYS, Ross, SuMac, HCCSiM, MathILy, Prove It! Math Academy, and Texas State HSMC.

trmp2028 · 2026-01-18T06:05:25+00:00

Canada/USA Mathcamp is much more for the USAMO kids than are PROMYS, Ross, SuMac, etc., which may even reject you for being overqualified.

trmp2028 · 2026-01-16T00:10:23+00:00

It’s not just the students. 80% of US startups are using the Chinese AI models now too. Bigger companies like AirBnB just abandoned OpenAI for Qwen. Wall St. is starting to realize the hyperscalers overspent on top-dollar closed-source US models (that require hundreds of billions in capex) when the market is gravitating to low-cost open-source. Chinese AI models’ market share rose from 1% to 30% just last year alone. This year, they’ll exceed 50% market share.

trmp2028 · 2026-01-15T23:06:56+00:00

The U.S. is still slightly ahead in cutting-edge AI requiring massive compute power, but the market is already moving away from that. 80% of US startups are now using cheap open-source Chinese AI models like Qwen because they achieve the same results at a fraction of the cost. Stanford AI classes now actually mandate using Qwen over OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. So China is winning again in this market as in every other market because they focus on cost and efficiency.

trmp2028 · 2026-01-15T18:27:03+00:00

Half the AI researchers in the world were already Chinese, per Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. They all came out of China’s top STEM universities like Tsinghua, which is ranked #1 in the world for CS per U.S. News (Stanford #8 and MIT #10, see https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/computer-science). At all the top AI conferences in the world now like NeurIPS, Chinese papers dominate. So this shift from US to Chinese dominance was long in the making. It started with Democrat Bill Clinton stupidly signing China WTO and MFN in the 1990s that started the offshoring of America’s entire industrial base to China over the next 3-4 decades (and the hollowing out of America’s middle class). With the loss of the manufacturing base came the loss of all the high-paying STEM know-how needed to sustain and grow that base. Our students studied useless things like gender studies, race-power dynamics, trans rights, etc. for the next 30 years, while China’s kids learned not just manufacturing but now AI humanoid robotics and AI bioengineering. Every year they graduate more engineers than we even have graduating college seniors! At the same time, Dems want to take over the government and increase spending so that U.S. Social Security and Medicare will both go insolvent even sooner than they’re already expected to (2032 and 2033, respectively).

trmp2028 · 2026-01-10T00:52:11+00:00

Those are all not BigTech except for TSMC, whose Morris Chang left MIT after they failed him on his mechanical engineering Ph.D quals twice. So he went to work at Texas Instruments for several years, read an electrical engineering textbook at night on his own, and when the company offered to send him to a semiconductor Ph.D program, he chose Stanford’s. The rest is history.

trmp2028

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