You wouldn't mistake Jeff Bezos for a rock star. Unless, like me, you happened to be standing around after the "Summit in Silicon Valley," an MSNBC TV special held in Memorial Auditorium earlier this year. After the show, I watched in amazement as Bezos, the balding, cherubic founder of online retailer Amazon.com, came to the edge of the stage and signed autographs for a crush of students eager to exchange a few words with a titan of the new economy. At least they didn't try to tear swatches from his blue blazer.
Much of the excitement that night came from the high wattage of the dot-com big shots on hand -- Bezos, eBay's Meg Whitman, eTrade's Christos Cotsakas, AOL's Steve Case, Yahoo's Jerry Yang, '90, MS '90. Together, they represented a few billion dollars in net worth -- at least on paper. But it struck me later that students packed the hall in part because they wanted to see some live examples of what happens when you step off the obvious path and explore the unknown. After all, these entrepreneurs had not ended up in investment banking, a law firm or a big consulting outfit -- the conventional choices of their time. "Career paths have become much less predictable," says Sohini Ramachandran, a sophomore who studies math and was there that night. "A passion for knowledge combined with initiative and some luck can take you very far."
Students like Ramachandran aren't alone in this fascination with the career path less traveled by. You find it among the faculty and alumni, too. And as I scan our table of contents for this issue, I see that we're caught up in chronicling the phenomenon.
Consider the undergrads we profile in our feature on the best student jobs. Here are seven people doing work that is meaningful, challenging and a little different. As a student ranger, Zoë Bradbury rides her mountain bike around the backroads of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Masud Shamsid-Deen oversees the website for the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project. He may end up as an Internet hotshot, but for now he's thinking about grad school in history. And then there's Sean Lucy. He spent the spring of his senior year as understudy to the business manager of the Associated Students of Stanford University. Now, he gets to play CEO himself, running the $8 million operation for a year. Not bad for a 22-year-old.
Robert L. Strauss was about the same age when he headed to Liberia as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1978. What he saw there fascinated and horrified him. He reflects on those complicated reactions in a memoir of his two decades as a Third World development expert. Pursuing his own idiosyncratic career trajectory, Strauss, MBA '84, MA '84, has traveled to 50 countries and consulted on hundreds of business projects. Five years ago, he set up a sideline -- freelance writing -- that is beginning to take over his professional life.
Rising from professor to provost to university president might seem a logical progression. But that's not how John Hennessy envisioned his career. Until a few years ago, Stanford's president-to-be saw himself as a teacher and researcher content in the computer lab and the classroom (okay, he did take a sabbatical to start a successful computer company). As writer Doug Swanson found out while profiling Hennessy for our cover story, the engineering professor didn't expect to become an administrator. Now, his talents have propelled him all the way to the top.
Hennessy, by the way, was on hand for the MSNBC telecast and even asked a question on the air. He wondered what the panel of digerati would do about making sure all young people have access to the Internet. As Stanford's next president, he could find himself answering that very question -- and maybe even signing some autographs.
You can send e-mail to Mark at mark.robinson@stanford.edu.
