1. Enthusiasm in the California Sun
Stanford is sunny almost all year. In its students, I have noticed another quality that is equally hard to miss: enthusiasm for what they are doing, and conviction that it matters. Two small examples come to mind.
During the first week of CS 224G, we had a pitch day. Everyone presented a project idea to attract teammates with similar interests. Perhaps half the students introduced themselves as the CEO or CTO of a startup, or mentioned where they had worked and for how long. Some had substantial experience. Stanford’s student population spans a wide range of ages, including part-time students and people returning after years of work. As they described their ideas, I could feel that they believed in their value and wanted others to help build them.
Another example came from CS 337U. One team’s presentations were always entertaining. The two students played off each other like a comedy duo, speaking quickly and weaving in funny little stories. Every time, they seemed eager to share what they had made: they thought it was great and could hardly wait to show the class. I had rarely encountered that feeling before. To them, the project seemed to be much more than an assignment. They polished the UI and UX, spending hours on details such as a Minecraft-like pixel style. They treated a course project almost as a work of art. Their agency—another quality people in the Bay Area value highly—made a strong impression on me.
At Peking University, presentations more often felt like something to finish for a grade. If someone showed too much enthusiasm, others might find it strange, adolescent, or a little embarrassing. Career conversations tended to revolve around internships at large companies and work pressure. When PhD students talked about their projects, they often approached their lives with a kind of ironic detachment. An earnest speech about the promise of someone’s research field might make you wonder whether they had even started their PhD yet. At Stanford, I have encountered a level of enthusiasm I saw less often at Peking University.
Enthusiasm may itself be something of a luxury. If you spend every day worrying about survival, work, and money, staying up late and living under constant pressure, it is difficult to find room for that kind of unreserved interest. Even Stanford’s enthusiasm leaves questions open: how much comes from love of the work, and how much is a performance encouraged by a particular culture? Still, it has prompted me to ask what I truly enjoy, what values I want to pursue, and what makes me excited.
2. Ducks on the Water
After the dot-com bubble around 2000, the image of the duck gradually became familiar on Stanford’s campus. “Stanford duck syndrome” describes students who appear polished, relaxed, and at ease while privately struggling. Like ducks gliding across a calm pond, they may be paddling furiously beneath the surface. Everyone can look composed while finding life considerably harder than they let on. I have felt something of that myself.
Take CS 336: Language Modeling from Scratch, a course widely regarded as one of Stanford’s best. I wanted to enroll in the spring quarter because it offered computing resources and valuable engineering experience in model training—experience that might be difficult to obtain elsewhere. But admission required an application. There were roughly ninety places and more than five hundred applicants. I did not get in, and approaching the teaching assistants did not change the outcome. I eventually changed my course plan.
I had already sensed that a course everyone knew was excellent, with scarce computing resources, would require an outstanding record to catch the teaching team’s attention. Even so, the intensity of the competition exceeded my expectations. Stanford has nearly twenty thousand students. The best resources are still available to only a few.
Project-based courses may offer demo days, but very few students receive follow-up interest from VCs. People here often maintain a gracious manner. They compliment your work and rarely dismiss it outright. Securing an investment or a further opportunity is another matter: there are simply too many exceptional people.
In an environment this smart, it is easy to notice your own limitations. I often feel that my thinking is rigid. At demo days, I sometimes encounter an idea so unexpected that I wonder why I could not have thought of it. We take similar courses and live in the same surroundings, yet some people notice hidden possibilities while I see only the obvious opportunities and join the competition for them.
One example was the Stanford virtual town project and its later offshoot, Simile. Simile uses agents to simulate human behavior, potentially gathering product feedback from a broad set of simulated users, shortening iteration cycles, or supporting experiments in sociology and economics. I watched founder Joon Sung Park, a Stanford CS PhD, speak with Sonya Huang on Training Data. The website also came up in CS 337U. I found it remarkable, but I would have struggled to imagine it myself.
I have no doubt that someone among the people I know here will build the next unicorn and help shape an era. I am equally certain that some of my Peking University classmates will be corporate executives twenty years from now. Yet only a few become the people who leave their mark on the larger story. Most of us, including most people carrying the Stanford name, will pass through it without much notice.
Anyone who gets to Stanford has already done well. But when the people you eat with, study with, and play sports with are just as smart—or smarter and more driven—the pressure to keep up can be considerable. A friend who waves to you on the street has raised a million dollars. Someone sharing your table may be training OpenAI’s next model. They are friendly and do not show off. Perhaps they have already seen achievements so much greater than their own that theirs hardly seem worth mentioning. Everyone is still a duck in the same pond, paddling hard.
Knowing these things creates a peculiar pressure: why can’t I do what they do? Or, from another angle, am I leaving time, energy, and resources unused? Am I failing to make use of this university to explore something more exciting? It is a pressure that rarely needs to be stated aloud.
Peking University has its own version of this. We used to joke that the gap between people at Peking University was greater than the gap between humans and dogs. Even within the tiny group selected by China’s highly competitive university entrance exams, the differences could be enormous. Someone else seemed to manage their time perfectly and excel at everything, while I felt unremarkable. You could call that an immature mindset, but it is also a feeling that can arise naturally in a small group of very accomplished people.
Peer pressure can push us toward a wider world and more ambitious work. It also brings strain, emptiness, and a great deal of mental energy spent comparing ourselves with others. Timing and luck may amplify the differences. Two people of similar ability might join the same company, but in the era of large models, one has experience training across multiple GPUs and the other mainly works on evaluation. Their salaries may diverge dramatically. From the outside, both may be earning extraordinary amounts; from within, the difference can still be difficult to accept. There is an old Chinese saying: people worry less about having little than about having less than others. I think something similar is at work here.
Many friends I know love Silicon Valley; many others dislike it intensely. Those who love it are drawn to technology and the clarity of purpose. Those who dislike it find it dull and homogeneous. To me, both reactions point to a culture with a concentrated set of values. People often come here for better opportunities, usually with a background in CS or a related field and a desire to do work with “impact”—another word frequently used and taken seriously here.
Those shared values attract more people with similar aspirations. Even someone who arrives mainly for a high salary can be shaped by the local standards and gradually adopt them. Many people end up moving in a similar direction. Their routes differ, but their goals are relatively aligned, which may help technology advance quickly.
That same similarity can make life feel narrow. Some people find the limited entertainment and homogeneous social circles oppressive. I can understand why: some people genuinely enjoy coding as a hobby and come home eager to read about the frontier or build another project. Still, calling the whole region homogeneous deserves more thought. Every place contains a range of people, and the Bay Area is not entirely one thing.
I have attended plays, films, stand-up shows, and concerts here. But the density and quality of those experiences, and the range of people I encounter through them, have felt far below what I found in Beijing. There, I could walk out the door and find a bar, book fair, or art exhibition. Here, finding those things often takes extra effort. I also know Bay Area friends who care deeply about cultural life and seem happy with what they find. Much depends on how someone approaches life here.
3. Two Paths
Broadly speaking, I have noticed two ways students approach their time here.
One is a familiar progression: take classes, complete projects, do internships, and eventually join a large company as an MLE or enter a research group and apply for a PhD. Most CS students around me seem to follow this route, though my own circle—mostly Chinese international students—may bias that impression.
As a Stanford student working in AI, I have not sensed much anxiety among my peers about finding an ordinary Bay Area job. Almost everyone seems to have a good internship arranged; unemployment does not feel like an immediate concern in this circle. This is also the steadier financial choice. A large company may offer less individual agency or sense of personal significance, but a stable, well-paid job and a predictable life are enough for many people, and something they want soon after graduation. Undergraduate and master’s tuition, along with living expenses, are substantial, after all.
The other approach has a now-or-never quality: if I do not take a chance on this AI wave now, perhaps I will never have another window like it. With little to lose and the cost of failure relatively low while still a student, why not try? These students often have ideas for startups, reach out to VCs, pursue funding, and want to build something or explore a new field. Some seem to hope they will help define an era. They know the risks are high but still believe they might be the exception.
I think many students on the first path are entirely capable of taking the second. But I tend to see the expected payoff from starting a company as negative, which helps explain why many choose a more conservative route. In the United States, returning from the second path to the first also seems relatively straightforward, and there is greater tolerance for failure. Even if a venture fails, you are still a Stanford graduate and can return to the conventional career path. You also gain an unusual experience, which has value in itself. I do not rank the two paths. They are personal choices, and someone may cross from one to the other at any time.
At Peking University, most students I knew followed the first route. Among my CS peers, the choices were more often a master’s or a PhD, studying abroad or continuing in China, and eventually joining a large company. Starting a business was never a default option. The entrepreneurs I met were more likely to be MBA or part-time master’s students who already ran companies, rather than students whose ventures had grown out of campus life.
I am still mostly a student and have limited experience in the technology workplace. Even so, I can see a similar division in the Bay Area. Some people place a high value on work–life balance. Certain companies offer schedules that seem relaxed compared with China: three days in the office, two at home, and finishing around four or five in the afternoon. Others, willingly or otherwise, work hard to keep pace with AI, learning new tools, revising their ideas, and generating results. Their weeks may stretch well beyond forty hours.
Some still seem to enjoy it. The financial rewards can be substantial, and they care about the field and believe they can take advantage of the moment to do more consequential work. Friends who have already graduated sometimes tell me that their working hours keep growing as AI develops.
Some Peking University alumni who returned from the Bay Area to start companies in China told me they disliked the atmosphere here because people were “too lazy.” I find that description interesting. The Bay Area I see is highly divided. If you want decent pay and a good work–life balance, you can find it. If you want to throw yourself into the wave, stay up late, and write code all weekend, there are plenty of opportunities for that, too.
4. The Gold Seekers of El Camino Real
North of campus runs a road called El Camino Real, Spanish for “the royal road.” During the Spanish colonial period, it connected San Diego to Sonoma, linking twenty-one missions over roughly nine hundred kilometers and passing through this area.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Spanish arrivals faced California’s grasslands, oak groves, and the Indigenous people they regarded as “ignorant.” I imagine they felt the excitement of an expedition, seeing a world waiting to be claimed, named, and developed.
Then came the Gold Rush of 1848. People arrived by ship through San Francisco from across the world, hoping to find wealth in California and change their lives. I have visited Alviso, where, I was told, a stretch of railway once carried inland goods toward the port at San Francisco. During the rush, freight gave way to passengers: cramped carriages crowded with young people from the East, heading for the mines with hopes of a new life.
In 1862, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, and westward expansion gathered momentum. In that era, Leland Stanford made a fortune in railroads. He later founded Stanford University in memory of his son, who had died young.
In 1939, two Stanford graduates, Hewlett and Packard, built their first audio oscillator in a Palo Alto garage. Hewlett-Packard was born, and the Peninsula’s story of garage entrepreneurship began.
In 1957, eight young engineers left Shockley’s laboratory in Mountain View and started Fairchild in Palo Alto. Some later went on to establish Intel. The semiconductor revolution took hold on the Peninsula, and the name Silicon Valley eventually became familiar around the world.
In 1976, in Cupertino, Jobs and Wozniak assembled the Apple I in a garage. Computers were moving out of machine rooms and onto desks, quietly opening another chapter in the technological transformation.
In 1998, Stanford graduate students Page and Brin worked on PageRank in a Menlo Park garage and named their company Google. Two students who had not yet graduated were redefining how people would find information on the internet.
In 2007, in San Francisco, Jobs held up an iPhone, combining an iPod, a phone, and a browser on one touchscreen. The mobile internet was finding its way into everyone’s pocket.
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI put a blank chat box online. No convention hall, no slide deck—just “Message ChatGPT…” Generative AI began its rapid ascent with an almost quiet gesture.
For more than two hundred and fifty years, El Camino Real has witnessed generation after generation begin again on this Peninsula: colonizing, searching for gold, laying tracks, assembling computers, training models. The names change—from the royal road to Silicon Valley—but a similar impulse keeps returning. Young people arrive wanting to change their fortunes, curious about the future, eager to leave something behind through their own work. Each seeks a place to grow alongside the forces of the time.
Today, a fourteen-hour flight in economy brings people to this shore, much as those old freight carriages once did. We are the gold seekers of the AI era, digging for new wealth in the ground left by earlier generations, or becoming the people who sell the shovels and jeans. We arrive with expectations for our lives; the opportunities and limits of the era reshape what those lives can become.
For more than two centuries, hoofbeats have passed along El Camino Real, through Stanford and Silicon Valley. Technologies advance and industries change. What continues is the story of people trying to understand who they are within their time, shaping that time and being shaped by it.