It's easy to get a job as a Stanford student. You can hash in Wilbur or shelve books in Green. The hours are flexible, the pay's usually decent (starting at $8.75 an hour) and the commute is a breeze. But what if you want to do something a little different -- explore an intellectual interest, develop some VIP connections or spend a lot of time outdoors? With those criteria in mind, we set out to identify the seven best student jobs at Stanford.
Some were obvious winners, like riding a mountain bike around Jasper Ridge, matching up freshman roommates and romping with 6-year-olds on the shores of Fallen Leaf Lake. Others took some investigating, but we managed to find a student whose job carries heavy financial responsibility, another who meets famous people at work, two students with an inside look at Stanford's winning sports program, and one who integrates academic interests into his work. These jobs aren't always glamorous, and they don't necessarily pay well, if at all. But those of us who tracked them down -- recalling our own student stints as hashers, ushers, clerks and driving instructors -- admit it: we're jealous.
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Joe Narens, '02
job freshman roommate assignment coordinator
pay $12 per hour plus rent-free summer housing on campus
I'll never forget the girl who called for reassurance about living in a four-class house. After we talked, she told me she loved me.
Freshman No. 1 is a football player from Delaware who likes loud music and stays up late. Housekeeping isn't his strength, but you wouldn't call him a slob. Freshman No. 2: a South American artist who enjoys listening to Aerosmith and debating politics long into the night. He makes his bed nearly every day.
A good match? The person who put them together thinks so.
Joe Narens spent last summer pairing off freshmen. As junior coordinator for the New Undergraduate Student Information Project, he hunted for auspicious matches among the 1,758 "preference forms" that recently accepted students fill out.
Narens, an industrial engineering major, is a little awed by the impact of his decisions. "It's a good feeling, but it's also a lot of responsibility," he says. "To some extent, you're controlling the fate of the freshmen and who their friends will be for the next four years."
He sorted the forms last summer with senior coordinator Chris Walton, '99. (Narens is now the senior coordinator.) First, they set aside students requesting ethnic theme houses or special programs like Freshman/Sophomore College, whose assignments are handled separately. Next, the forms were computer-processed to sort students into dorms. Then the real work began as Narens and Walton went through each dorm pile, mixing and matching individuals. Their starting point: aim to match students from different ethnic groups and geographic regions (although there are so many Californians that some inevitably room together). From there, Narens says, roommate compatibility often comes down to simple things like bedtimes, noise tolerance and relative neatness. "The idea is that you put together people who are different in background but similar in many of their living habits," he explains.
During the school year, he got a lot of questions from roommates who were mystified by what could have brought them together. One prevalent theory: "Everyone seems to be matched with someone who likes the same music," observes Samantha Crow, a freshman in Donner House. Music is definitely a factor, Narens says, but in cases where many students share similar living habits, decisions hinge on the form's final question, an open-ended request for likes, dislikes and quirks. This is where things get interesting. "Someone told us they drool, and someone put down they like to sleep naked," he confides.
For Narens himself, the system succeeded. He and his freshman roommate got along so well that they now joke about starting a business together in Silicon Valley. "He's [East] Indian, from Wayne, New Jersey; I'm Jewish, from Canton, Ohio," says Narens. "Right there, there's a lot of diversity in the room. But we have similar music tastes, similar habits, both go to bed at relatively reasonable hours. That's the system for most people, and it definitely worked for us."
-- Irene Noguchi, '02
Power Ranger
Zoë Bradbury, '01
job ranger and docent, Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve
pay $12 per hour
I'll never forget seeing the raw power of nature when the dam flooded and plumes of water shot 20 feet into the air.
If there's a gate unlocked, a trespasser roaming, a trail littered or a mountain lion on the prowl, Zoë Bradbury will find it. Known as "the eyes and ears of the Ridge," Bradbury works at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, nearly 12,000 acres of protected open space in the Stanford Foothills. She has full access to fragile lands that others see only on guided tours.
As one of 10 rangers at Jasper Ridge, Bradbury rides her mountain bike on 2 1/2-hour patrols. She carries a cell phone to call in anything out of the ordinary -- say, a low-flying helicopter or a coyote sighting. She also serves as a docent, leading nature walks across terrain that shelters thousands of plant and animal species, from great blue herons to sticky monkey flowers.
Bradbury, an anthropological sciences major from Langlois, Ore., didn't stumble into her job at Jasper Ridge. In fact, she transferred from Simon's Rock College in Massachusetts largely because of the preserve. "It's a rarity, this place, an island in the middle of the sprawl of Silicon Valley," she sighs. "It's food for the soul."
And Bradbury is sharing the feast. Last year, she dreamed up an environmental program for Eastside Prep, a private high school in East Palo Alto. Her idea was to help low-income kids experience nature firsthand, "giving them a chance to see science beyond the textbook." Today she oversees the program -- now two semesters old -- as part of her job. Bradbury, who hopes eventually to work in environmental education, won a $30,000 Truman public service scholarship this spring, and the panel cited her program at Jasper Ridge.
After two years at the preserve, she's still amazed at being paid to immerse herself in nature. "It's an enormous privilege," she says, "to have a key to the gate."
-- Jen Davis, '99
Coming to You Live
Nick Larson, '02, and Shaumo Sadhukhan, '01
job KZSU sports broadcaster
pay no salary, but expenses covered
I'll never forget having to broadcast the early minutes of a game by phone after losing the connection to the studio.
It's 52 minutes before tip-off in the women's basketball game against UC-Berkeley. Players are taking practice shots. The floor's shaking, and Smash Mouth's "All Star" is blaring. Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer is ignoring it all. She's huddled with KZSU sports reporter Shaumo Sadhukhan, doing a pregame interview. Sadhukhan observes that Stanford should win handily over Cal, which is 0-4 in the Pac-10. VanDerveer is more cautious. "A wounded bear is a dangerous bear," she warns.
Sadhukhan, from Houston, is one of 10 students who broadcast Stanford sports live for the campus radio station at 90.1 FM. He and Nick Larson, from Seattle, cover women's basketball. They take turns going to road games and work together at home games, where Sadhukhan does the play-by-play and Larson provides color commentary.
It's a fitting division of labor. Before the game, the energetic Larson hums along with the Band and talks to himself while scanning media guides as if he's cramming for a test: "Okay, whadda we got, whadda we got, gimme a stat." Sadhukhan quietly studies his handwritten cheat sheets, which list each player, the pronunciation of her name and individual statistics.
Once the game starts, Sadhukhan swiftly explains the action: "Flores has it and will quickly bring it up and in to Moos. Moos makes a nice catch and goes in for the layup." Larson, grinning as freshman Jamie Carey makes two three-point shots in the first three minutes, declares, "The Cardinal is having its own competition for the Pac-10 shooting title." But when the color man starts to gobble up airtime, Sadhukhan has to scramble to recap the action. "You've got to get out of the way on some of this stuff," Sadhukhan tells his partner during the next time-out.
As broadcasting hopefuls, Sadhukhan and Larson each spent a year working as a KZSU engineer and hosting the talk show "Sports Zoo." To refine their on-air skills, they study tapes of their broadcasts. "The first time," Larson confesses, "I sounded like Porky Pig."
Though both now sound like pros, sometimes it's obvious they're still in school. Larson marvels that the station covers his road expenses, and Sadhukhan gushes over the free buffet in the press room: "Stanford has the best food in the Pac-10. We have shrimp before every game." No starving students here.
-- Kathy Zonana, '93, JD '96
I Have a Dream Job
Masud Shamsid-Deen, '01
job webmaster, Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project
pay $10 per hour
I'll never forget hearing some of Dr. King's most powerful words while choosing sound bites for the site.
At first, Masud Shamsid-Deen just wanted to snag some extra credit. A freshman, he was enrolled in a spring-quarter class on the African-American freedom struggle. His professor, Clayborne Carson, offered one unit to students willing to help catalog material for the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, which is based at Stanford and run by Carson. "I figured, sure, I can use the extra unit," Shamsid-Deen says.
But once he began rooting around in the nation's most exhaustive archive of King speeches, letters, journals and academic writings, Shamsid-Deen was hooked. He remembers going home to Dallas that summer thinking he'd like to learn more about the slain civil rights leader. When he returned to school the next fall, he e-mailed one of the King Project's editors, asking for work -- and what started as a position in computer support became the job of webmaster for the entire project.
Shamsid-Deen, who had to teach himself web programming and computer network skills, now spends about 15 hours a week overseeing an ambitious website (http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/) aimed at bringing highlights of Carson's project to a wider audience. So far, about 600 documents are online. More than 100,000 people visit the site each month. "The Internet is the perfect way to get this information out," says Shamsid-Deen as he sits at a souped-up Micron Millennia computer in Carson's third-floor history department office. "Anyone who wants to find out more about this historical figure can do it here, without spending a dime."
He scrolls through some recent additions to the sprawling site, landing on "An Appraisal of the Great Awakening," a paper King wrote in 1950 as a seminary student. It's the kind of in-depth material Shamsid-Deen says he never encountered until he joined the project. "I was one of those people who thought of Dr. King as the man who said, 'I have a dream,' and that was about it," he says.
Shamsid-Deen is now a junior, and his part-time job is shaping his academic trajectory. He's switched his major from economics to history and pretty much abandoned the idea of a career in investment banking or consulting. Instead, he's thinking about graduate school and university-level teaching.
His young family will likely influence the decision. As one of about two dozen married undergraduates at Stanford, he lives in Escondido Village with his wife, high school sweetheart Felicia, and their daughter, Melliah, 2. Another influence will be Carson, who has become a friend and mentor. Shamsid-Deen has a key to Carson's office (for access to the computer), and the two meet weekly. "I'm not being treated like a student," the webmaster says. "It's more like being a peer or a consultant."
He thrives on the feedback -- praise and criticism -- from users around the world. Their e-mails help Shamsid-Deen decide which documents to digitize next. He hears from about 100 people a month -- parents, teachers, college students and others. "It is amazing," wrote student Katja Galow in a recent note from Germany. "I found your home page -- and with it all the stuff I need for my speech." In other words, Shamsid-Deem now gets more extra credit than he ever expected.
-- Mark Robinson
Executive Privilege
Sean Lucy, '99
job president and CEO, Stanford Student Enterprises
pay $30,000 per year
I'll never forget training full time in spring of senior year while friends partied and planned post-graduation vacations.
At 22, Sean Lucy is CEO of a multimillion-dollar company. What's more, he gets to park anywhere on campus for free. What really drives Lucy, though, isn't the money or the minivan. It's the chance to spend a year leading a team of 150 entrepreneurial-minded people, most of them Stanford students.
Lucy heads Stanford Student Enterprises, which manages the $8 million endowment of the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU). Set up in 1996 as a training ground for student entrepreneurs, Stanford Student Enterprises also raises money for the ASSU, which receives no University funds, by operating services such as Lecture Notes and Sunday Flicks. On any given day, Lucy meets with five to 25 people to discuss budget proposals and financial policies. Though he has plenty of advisers, it's up to him to call the shots, whether that means selecting stocks and bonds to invest in or deciding how to coordinate a new web project.
"I anticipated the heavy responsibilities," says Lucy, who had already worked for Stanford Student Enterprises as projects director and internal auditor. Those high-powered demands, in fact, were a major draw. Where else, he reasoned, could an economics major find such a challenge right out of school?
He began serious training for the CEO job in the spring of 1999, working beside his predecessor, Matt Garlinghouse, '98, instead of schmoozing at the Goose like most graduating seniors. "I was here at work for 35 or 40 hours a week. It was a little tough, because I still had to take classes," he says. "It wasn't like the 'awesome spring quarter' of senior year, but I was having a lot of fun doing it and I don't regret it at all." He moved right into the leadership post as soon as school was out.
Today, a year later, Lucy has traded his schoolbooks for a Filofax. Instead of grabbing a falafel at a dining hall, he has just come from a lunch date at Palo Alto's posh restaurant Zibibbo with John Hall, '94, founder and chairman of the board of Stanford Student Enterprises. Before heading into an afternoon forecasting meeting with the investment directors, Lucy eases into his swivel chair to plan a staff retreat at Tahoe. Later, if he has time, he might sneak out to run the Dish or visit friends who still work at the Chaparral, which he used to edit. After work, there's dinner -- probably at Tresidder, he winces -- and a video with his girlfriend.
In the midst of running the business this spring, Lucy had to find his own replacement. In June, when he hands the baton (and the University minivan) to Colby Elizabeth McGavin, '00, Lucy says he will remember this as "a great business education." And, since he plans to work next in a Silicon Valley start-up, he'll be sure to come back and visit. Only this time, he'll have to pay for parking.
-- Sonya Schneider, '00
A Seat at the Table
Aron Ketchel, '00
job chair, Stanford in Government
pay no salary, but priceless contacts
I'll never forget a dinner for 10 at the Lakehouse where George Shultz told stories from his time as secretary of state.
Aron Ketchel is only 21, but already he has shared greasy pizza with Milton Friedman, lunched with Newt Gingrich and heard the inside scoop on the White House from former chief of staff Leon Panetta. And he didn't just sit there awestruck. Ketchel actually challenged Nobel laureate Friedman with an obscure question on game theory, grilled Gingrich on health care reform and asked Panetta how the party that doesn't control the White House might present a unified message.
He got this extraordinary access through his post as chair of Stanford in Government, a nonpartisan student group that brings more politicos to speak on campus than any other organization. Of course, everyone's invited to the big speeches. But Ketchel enjoys face-to-face contact with many of the speakers before and after the main events. "You are sitting there with these people who have made very important decisions," Ketchel says. "It's amazing."
He's a natural for the job. As a high schooler in Tucson, Ariz., Ketchel was already a political junkie. He served on student council all four years and as student body president his junior and senior years. He volunteered at a phone bank for his Republican congressman, then developed an affection for moderate Democrats, particularly on social issues.
Bringing newsmakers to campus isn't Ketchel's only responsibility. From his office in the Haas Center for Public Service, he oversees a budget of $110,000 (drawn from an endowment, student fees and fund raising) and an organization of 80 active students. Members work in 11 committees, which do everything from promoting voter awareness on campus to encouraging grade-school kids to get interested in politics. The group's biggest project is administering a roster of prestigious fellowships, in which Stanford students earn stipends and do professional-level work at government offices in Sacramento, Washington, D.C., and abroad. "My job is to make sure everyone works together," says Ketchel, a public policy major who was chosen for the yearlong post by the outgoing chair last spring.
Running Stanford in Government, he says, has helped him develop close ties with several faculty members, including political science professor Judy Goldstein and Hoover Institution senior fellow John Cogan. Both have challenged him to consider other options before taking the obvious path to law school. For now, the graduating senior hopes to parlay his management experience into a key position at a Silicon Valley start-up -- but it's hard to imagine him staying out of politics for long.
-- Christine Foster
One Happy Camper
Karen Hyun, '00
job counselor and rock-climbing instructor, Stanford Sierra Camp
pay $4,000 per summer (about half from guest tips)
I'll never forget coaching a teenage girl and her crying mom to the top of a towering rock face.
It's perfectly calm on Fallen Leaf Lake in the Sierra Nevada, but down in the shadows under the dock at Stanford Sierra Camp, the crawdads are getting nervous. Overhead, a dozen kids sprawl on the floating platform, wiggling stick-and-twine fishing poles baited with Gummi Bears, trying to lure the crustaceans out from under the rocks. As the first child hauls in his prize, Karen Hyun runs up with a white bucket. "It keeps the kids occupied for a good hour," the Stanford senior says, laughing. "We'll catch about 30 crawdads, and then we throw them back into the lake so they'll be there for the next week's campers."
This summer marks Hyun's third and last season as a staff member at Stanford Sierra Camp, and already she's feeling nostalgic. No wonder. Nestled among ancient pines at the edge of the Desolation Wilderness, the Alumni Association retreat has been attracting nature lovers for more than 30 years. Guests are usually alumni and their children, who sign up for one-week stays. On most days, kids ages 3 and up are placed in the care of 39 undergraduate counselors while their parents relax or take student-run lessons in rock climbing, sailing, tennis and windsurfing. Mealtimes and evenings are communal, with disco parties, faculty lectures and talent shows.
Hyun's job typically starts in mid-June, when she and the 59 other staff members scrub the cabins in preparation for the first 60 families. For the next 13 weeks, her main responsibility is to serve as a pied piper for 5- and 6-year-olds, an age bracket known in camp parlance as Snoopers. On one morning, she might take them out on Boatster, the motorized pontoon. Another day, she and her merry band might hike to a rock outcropping, where they'll munch on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches while Hyun reads them a book about the Berenstain Bears.
Counselors get great tips and free room and board, but the most talked-about perk is the camaraderie that develops among them, Hyun says. "These are some of the best kids at Stanford," says the earth systems major from Malvern, Pa. "Some of my closest friends are the ones I've made at camp."
Sierra Camp draws more than 200 job applicants each season. The basic qualifications, says assistant director Jed Mitchell, '94, are a strong work ethic, enthusiasm, compassion and sincerity. He and his six-student interview committee also look for special talents. "Some people are great singers, some have a fascination for Eastern religion, some have spent years designing programs for kids," Mitchell says. "And some really like to clean toilets."
Hyun's forte is rock climbing, so she showed the committee how to tie a climber's double-figure-eight knot. She spent her first summer belaying guests at a 70-foot-tall granite outcropping near camp.
Summers there, says Hyun, have "taught me to be creative and positive and encouraging, and how to make people feel comfortable. I've grown more at camp that any other place I've been." Next year, she plans to apply some of what she's learned by working as a substitute teacher. After that, she hopes to earn her master's in earth systems, then serve in the Peace Corps for a couple of years. Eventually, Hyun thinks she might like to be a high school teacher, specializing in marine science.
But first, one last summer at camp, where she'll enjoy catching crawdads while she can.
-- Theresa Johnston, '83
