How Can You Tell the Difference Between a Stanford Undergraduate and a Stanford Grad Student?

1/24/2020

The grad students wear helmets when they bike.

It's a striking distinction that seemingly every Stanford grad student has noticed. I'm not sure if the undergrads are aware of this since I don't know any. But signs point to no since they don't appear aware of anything at all as they wheel around the campus at high speeds, stylish hair unencumbered by styrofoam or plastic. I've been biking around Stanford lately and the only thing more stressful than dodging the other students myself is witnessing the constant stream of near-misses around me. Here's a few snapshots all from a single day of biking back and forth:

An undergrad on a bike signals his left turn and then shoots the gap between four other bicycles going the other way, none of them changing speed or direction. Two undergrads are biking side-by-side ahead of me on a narrow path; another biker approaches head-on but has to skitter to a stop and catch himself on the curb as the two bikers don't form a single file or even pause their conversation. The undergrad who was abruptly stopped coming towards us is now standing in the grass and doesn't even look angry as we bike by. An undergrad on a skateboard scrolls instagram in one hand and holds a Starbucks coffee in the other. An undergrad on one of those electric-wheel-things zooms full-tilt through a roundabout also used by cars, passing inches from a runner in the crosswalk. Then at the next intersection I see a guy in a wheelchair coming from my right. Except it's motorized somehow and he rockets through the four-way stop making a left at easily 20 miles an hour, practically drifting this wheelchair right in front of me. This kid was wearing a motorcycle helmet though so he's probably getting a PhD.

Watching students bike around Stanford is like that Nintendo commercial where everyone gets teleported to the universe of Super Mario and gleefully jumps about on platforms and Goombas even though we all know that in a realistic world everyone would be dying over and over from their carelessness. It's like that scene near the end of Final Destination where the characters finally realize Death is out to get them and then look around and see a everything going dangerously wrong -- the man dropping a propane tank that starts rolling down the hill, the electric pole shooting out a burst of sparks.

Changing gears a bit, last week I read Ed Catmull's Creativity Inc. When I took Advanced Computer Graphics in college I didn't realize that it could have just as accurately been called Stuff Ed Catmull Invented In The 70's. (For CS people, we owe to Ed: texture mapping, the Z-buffer, useful splines, smoothing of 3D models via recursively subdividing polygons, and more). This guy's lifestory is like a quintessential example of using skill to leverage lucky breaks. He got his PhD in computer science at University of Utah back when it was the fourth university to be connected to Internet-precursor ARPANET (after UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford). Then he headed up George Lucas' computer research division at Lucasfilm during the making of Return of the Jedi. When Lucas ran out of money he decided to sell them off to the then-estranged-millionaire Steve Jobs. At first they worked on a specialized image processing computer that they called "The Pixar", but then switched to making animated movies: Toy Story, A Bug's Life (which is of special interest to this blogger), Finding Nemo, Up, The Incredibles and more. In the book Ed Catmull tries to lay out how he did it.

Catmull is the first to admit that he was not a super-genius who forged his life path out of sheer will -- luck played a big part. He relates a time when his dad got in an accident while the whole family was in the car and they stopped two inches short of falling off a cliff. Every Pixar movie was just two inches away from never existing. But then, Catmull asks, how many two-inches-away-from-not-existing moments did he and Pixar survive without even noticing? There's a sense of nausea that comes with trying to contemplate the enormous importance of every little moment and decision that brought you to where you are now. How can you stand the pressure to move forward knowing every move you make is so consequential?

Catmull says we have no choice but to acknowledge and embrace this randomness. He lays out several lessons to help navigate the unknown: If you're likely to make a wrong decision, be wrong as fast as possible so you can switch to the right one. But don't assume that because you did something, and then succeeded, that it must have been the right decision owing entirely to your skill -- randomness probably intervened on your behalf. Also cross-check your views against the perspectives of people you trust and listen to what they have to say. Finally don't rely entirely on luck, you have to seize every advantage you can find (something Steve Jobs was a master at).

As most of you know, I quit my cushy-but-unethical Facebook engineering gig in order to try to make my own video game. Creativity Inc. was a valuable persective on the technical-and-creative life that I am now pursuing. My takeaway is that maybe this creative life path is a bit like biking across Stanford's chaotic campus. And you know I'll be wearing a helmet.

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