Thanks to my LinkedIn graduation post and some contacts I made via LinkedIn I was introduced to Charlotte, who also studied in Delft and was now completing her MBA at Stanford, or GSB as they like to call is (Graduate School of Business). She was nice enough to invite me to her birthday party in Palo Alto (where Stanford is located) even though we had never really met in person and I decided, why not? Don’t know many people here anyways.
Getting to Palo Alto from the Richmond, was by no means going to be easy or fast. I’d have to take the BART to a Caltrain station and then get picked up from there because Palo Alto is not very public transport friendly. At least not compared to San Francisco. Luckily, Charlotte even managed to find a friend that agreed to pick me up for her birthday party.
Caltrain
The Caltrain is nothing like I’d seen before, even compared to the trains in India. What made them so particularly fascinating to me was how when they arrived they reminded me of the Hogwarts Express for some reason. The train wasn’t particularly fast, it was pretty loud, very bulky looking, and far from modern. It was pretty square and had two full floors pretty high off-ground level, meaning you were seater up pretty high in contrast to the Netherlands where the trains are pretty low for aerodynamics.
Everything about it just looked strange to me. When I got in, I decided to sit upstairs but there was this weird hole on the “second floor”, so it was basically just a row of single seats hovering over the first-floor seats. The construction was in no way compact or efficient looking, nor was it aesthetically pleasing in the modern sense. It felt more like I had traveled back in time and this train just appeared out of nowhere.
Charlotte’s birthday
Ever want to meet a bunch of Stanford people? Go to a party in Palo Alto (I’m talking like I know everything, but remember this is actually just my first impression). Charlotte lived in campus housing together with her partner in a very large apartment that was subsidised by Stanford for students as it otherwise would probably have been unaffordable. It had a great living room with a full dining table set up, a cozy sofa area around the corner, and a kitchen separated by a wall (this is above the average of most apartments I’ve seen so far in San Francisco).
Charlotte and her partner had really gone all out and the table was filled with a wide assortment of delicious homemade snacks and dips including humus, baba ganoush, falafel, aubergine treats, a cheese platter, and so on. By all means, this immediately felt like a much classier party than the ones I was used to, with chips and dips in supermarket packaging stacked on a table.
What I found particularly noticeable was that there was also a stack of colourful cans next to the wines they had set out on the sofa table. These weren’t a range of beers, but rather a mix of sodas with different flavours, which apparently is very common in the US because people don’t drink as much as many people were driving. I only realised this after almost grabbing a soda by accident and happened to check the label to make sure it wasn’t an alcohol-free beer.
Over the course of the night, I think over 50 people had joined Charlotte’s birthday party, so it got pretty hard to have a conversation with someone and actually understand them during the peak. The only thing I could constantly make out were the words “Stanford” or “MBA”, and at one point I started to notice I was really one of the only non-Standford non-MBA people there, which was also a surprise to most of the guests.
Although most people seemed to have very interesting backgrounds and everyone came from different corners of the world, the vibe was still pretty monotone in the sense that everyone was doing an MBA. At the same time, I don’t want to judge because I can imagine it’s difficult to make new friends if you just moved halfway across the world for an MBA and that meeting people outside your cohort isn’t really the prioriy.
During one of the entrepreneurship events in the first week, I remember SC Moatti highlighting the importance of your network. An MBA program is exactly that, you pay to become a part of that network, so you better spend your time in the program bonding with everyone as best you can.
I really hope I’m not coming across as too judgy here, it’s just something I noticed. Especially because this is really comparable to student life in Delft. Everyone will likely immediately assume you are also studying at university and ask you what you study, and sometimes it feels like the world outside doesn’t really exist. This is one of the reasons I decided to leave Delft earlier than the average student, but it is interesting experiencing another type of bubble from the other side.
One thing that I did find odd was that the majority of the attendees seemed to have multiple parties planned on the same evening, up to as many as 4 parties in one go. So, the same group was literally party hopping around from one party to the next. Not something that would be appreciated in the Netherlands, I think.
Anywho, after the party died down a bit, I decided to join Will (remember Will from last week?) at a French party on the other side of Palo Alto.
French Party
Upon arriving, I found out that the French party was basically a party hosted by the French student community of Stanford, which you could tell by the combination of people with the French flag stripes painted on their face and the amount of people wearing Stanford t-shirts. This was a proper house party, similar to the ones you see in American movies, in a suburban neighbourhood with disco lights shining through the windows of the garage.
In this case, most people did look about my age and they were all dancing to top 40s songs from the 2010s. There were red and blue plastic cups everywhere and liquor, chips and (normal) brownies set out on tables lined up against one of the walls. The garage was pretty hot and full and the wall across from the alcohol was covered in carboard and decorated with drawings of “French things” like baguettes and the Eiffel tower.
The party wasn’t very eventful, but I did meet some of Will’s very nice and fun friends. We ended up hanging out and talking about life in a strange white room, I think they called it the psychedelic room, with a mattress on the floor and a beamer projecting a black and white old school cartoon on the wall that didn’t play.
At the end of the evening around 2am, I had to decide whether to crash on Will’s sofa and get up incredibly early the next day and take public transport for 1 hour and 50 minutes $14,20, travel back at night for 3 hours or take a 40-minute drive Lyft (comparable to Uber) back directly for $42. I decided for the latter because it was really convenient and for the fact that it was nearly a 60km drive and only cost $42, I was getting a really good deal.
I ended up with a very talkative Lyft driver and found out that he was only getting around $25 of the $42 that I was paying. So that’s something to keep in mind. I thought, from now on I’ll try to make friends with drivers and call them up personally so it’s better for both of us, but I haven’t actually tried that out yet.