Overheard at Stanford

Since arriving at Stanford as a freshman in September 2021, I’ve been collecting memorable quotes overheard in lecture halls, dorm rooms, and everywhere in between. As I prepare to graduate, I’ve curated 100 of my favorite snippets to share. They capture what I love most about Stanford: a community where intellectual curiosity, authenticity, and humor coincide. Names have been anonymized for privacy.

Wisdom From Professors

1. “Technically, every restaurant is all you can eat.”
   — Professor, Economics

2. “You can't kill a Great Dane with chocolate. I've tried.”
   — Chocolatier, on experimenting with chocolates

3. “Unemployment bad. Inflation bad.”
   — Professor, Economics

4. “This is what we do as lawyers. We read words.”
   — Professor, Stanford Law, on litigation

5. “It would be like giving babies weapons. It's fun, entertaining, but it could be very dangerous.”
   — Professor of Computer Science, on abstraction

6. “Science moves at the speed of business.”
   — Professor of Computer Science, on the future of quantum computing

7. “If you make prolonged eye contact, you're either going to fight or kiss.”
   — Professional Improvisor

8. “It is okay for a person to be her own child.”
   — Problem Set, CS 221, clarifying rules for first order logic

9. “If that doesn't make sense, just smack your head until it makes sense.”
   — Professor, Statistics, on analysis of variance

10. “Everybody is nicer to white people.”
    — Professor, Computer Science, on bias in AI

11. “High status people sit on furniture wrong.”
    — Professional Improvisor

12. “Perhaps we're in a simulation...”
    — Professor, Statistics, on highly improbable events

13. “People who are likeable and those who love making consequential decisions rarely exist in the same body.”
    — Chief Product Officer, on product managers

14. “Treat AI as the average of all the internet, which may not hold a particularly deep level of insight.”
    — Vice President, Product

15. “If you don't know, just use whiskey.”
    — Doctor, Stanford Medicine, on alcohol and cooking

16. “Suspending disbelief is a useful thing.”
    — Professor, Statistics, on a theorem about t-tests

17. “It's illegal to spoof GPS. It's very easy to find out where you are...and then you go to jail. Don't do it.”
    — Professor, Computer Science

18. “Using AI is like having infinite interns.”
    — Vice President, Product

19. “Your Caitlyn Clarks and your Danny DeVitos are not well served by the same standard.”
    — Medical Researcher, Stanford Medicine, on aortic aneurysms

20. “I cannot count the number of people who are lost in the sauce on market size.”
    — Vice President, Product, on Fermi estimations

Wisdom From Peers

21. “Have you ever had an egg before?”
    — Student, Design

22. “It could eat me, so I want to eat it.”
    — Student, Computer Science

23. “I have a capybara and I have to give it to the child.”
    — Student, Mechanical Engineering, while improvising

24. “Are you a word of your man?”
    — Student, Data Science

25. “Do you know any white people?”
    — Student, Design, on finding survey participants

26. “Daydrinking is a group activity.”
    — Anonymous, overheard in line for flu shots

27. “This pasta will be so good that you explode all over the wall.”
    — Student, GSB, on being Italian

28. “I don't know what this is. I think it's a rhinoceros with a chicken head.”
    — TA, Computer Science, during lecture on computer systems

29. “So, this is a game called Flesh Mask.”
    — TA, Improvisation

30. “I skipped class because I couldn't finish my make-up on time.”
    — Student, Biology

31. “Now I understand why statistics rhymes with sadistic.”
    — Student, Statistics, after completing a proof

32. “My child is in the microwave...she's kind of stinky.”
    — Student, Anthropology, on sourdough

33. “It would be great if AI agents just took our jobs and destroyed everybody.”
    — Student Founder, Computer Science

34. “Any ounce of attention we give Berkeley is philanthropy on our part.”
    — The Fizzler, on rivalries in Gaieties 2024

35. “I don't deserve love until my start-up reaches 1 million ARR [annual recurring revenue].”
    — Student Founder, Computer Science, on relationships

36. “I just went on a huge dumpling rampage, like an hour ago.”
    — Student, Biology

On Math and Statistics

37. “If you want to send a rocket to space and have it crash in the ocean, then fine...use Gram-Schmidt.”
    — Professor, Statistics, on computational stability

38. “Could you stay that formula in like...English?”
    — Student, Math, on matrix theory

39. “Hopefully you don't think about Taylor expansions very much, because that's my life. And I wouldn't recommend my life.”
    — PhD Student, Statistics, on infinite sums

40. “If this formula is not okay, I think my job in statistics is in danger.”
    — Professor, Statistics

41. “I could prove it, but I'm old and tired.”
    — Professor, Math

42. “Be happy, be generous, and think about the singular value decomposition.”
    — Professor, Statistics, on life

43. “Where is my matrix...it's gone? I need to bring it back to life!”
    — Professor, Statistics, with great concern

44. “In that case, I would be very happy but you would not understand anything.”
    — Professor, Math, on proving the general case

45. “I'm not showing you my research just because it's a cool paper with a lot of citations...and a patent...and millions of people use it...”
    — Professor, Statistics, with pride

46. “This is the seductive magic of moment generating functions, and I mean both words: seductive and magic!”
    — Professor, Statistics, on moment generating functions

47. “The singular value decomposition is the queen of all decompositions. You can do anything with it!”
    — Professor, Statistics, with great excitement

48. “The guy was a terrible person, but he was a great statistician!”
    — Professor, Statistics, on Ronald Fisher

49. “What makes you jiggle?”
    — Professor, Statistics, on inspiration

On Computer Science

50. “The other reason I'm covering this is so you stay out of jail.”
    — Professor, Databases, on data, privacy, and ethics

51. “We are now out of an AI winter...I would say we're in the AI global warming period.”
    — Professor, Artificial Intelligence, on the AI boom

52. “Then, you and Darth Vader hash it out. Hashtag hash puns.”
    — Professor, Algorithms

53. “So, my next goal is to make everybody fall asleep.”
    — Professor, Algorithms, on dynamic programming

54. “I will confess to you that I am afraid of a lot of computer hardware.”
    — Professor, Systems, on software versus hardware

55. “Cats are very deformable, so they create problems for algorithms.”
    — Professor, Artificial Intelligence, on cats

56. “You cannot go through life without seeing a proof of the birthday paradox.”
    — Professor, Cryptography, on hash collisions

57. “I was watching the muppets the other day, it's amazing!”
    — Professor, Theory

58. “Go home, ChatGPT, you're drunk!”
    — Professor, Human-Computer Interaction, on hallucinations

59. “That's called a fork bomb. That'll bring the system to its knees.”
    — Professor, Systems, on multiprocessing

60. “Whenever I have a medical issue, I just go to ChatGPT and ask it for a diagnosis. Please don't take medical advice from me.”
    — Professor, Artificial Intelligence

61. “He was convicted. Then, as all felons, he finished grad school and then became a professor at M.I.T. He's been tenured since the mid-2000s.”
    — Professor, Systems

62. “When we greet each other, we don't say Hello, we say Hello world.”
    — Professor, Systems, on greeting engineers

63. “This block's definition of being friends is eating its friend.”
    — TA, Systems, on coalescing blocks

64. “If you don't want to use Julia, that's fine. My love for you is unconditional.”
    — Professor, Aeronautics, on using Python versus Julia

65. “They need to market aerodynamic candy for people like me!”
    — Professor, Systems, while throwing candy during lecture

66. “You guys all remember the laws of logarithms from kindergarten, right?”
    — Professor, Aeronautics, on loss functions

67. “We'll see plenty other applications of minimum cuts that don't involve sabotaging Russian railways.”
    — Professor, Algorithms, on the min-cut max-flow theorem

68. “It's called a Wiener attack. It's invented by Michael Wiener, so don't get too excited.”
    — Professor, Cryptography, on cryptographic attacks on RSA

69. “There is no place I would rather be, than in NVIDIA Auditorium with you, explaining the Dirichlet distribution.”
    — Professor, Aeronautics, with full sincerety

70. “'fsck' sounds like something you yell when your computer crashes.”
    — Professor, Systems, on fsck (file system check)

71. “You can impress your dates when you show them you know all about authenticated encryption.”
    — Professor, Cryptography

72. “I don't think anyone in this room has access to a 10,000 GPU cluster. If you do, come talk to me—I'd like to be your friend.”
    — Professor, Artificial Intelligence, on training foundation models

73. “Since you are very eager, I want to satisfy your thirst.”
    — Professor, Aeronautics, on the Dirichlet distribution

74. “When you go on a date next week, you can tell your partner about pseudorandom permutations and pseudorandom functions.”
    — Professor, Cryptography, on dating

75. “Make sure to clean up after your zombie children.”
    — Professor, Systems, on child processes

76. “You can tell by my voice cracking that this is serious stuff.”
    — Professor, Systems, on closing pipes and file descriptors

77. “We have to talk about spaghetti. I am Italian, but that's not why.”
    — Professor, Systems, on the dining philosophers problem

78. “You now have a superpower! You can invert modulo n.”
    — Professor, Cryptography, on multiplicative inverses

79. “You can pull up the source code for Linux as a nice bedtime reading.”
    — Professor, Systems

On Social Sciences

80. “My biking buddy just won the Nobel Prize.”
    — Professor, Economics

81. “Anyone know Latin?”
    — Postdoctoral Scholar, Philosophy

82. “There is a creative embellishment. The doll becomes a weapon.”
    — Professor, Psychology, on Albert Bandura's social learning theory

83. “I want to get down and dirty with the Geneva Conventions.”
    — Postdoctoral Scholar, Philosophy, on military ethics

84. “We just wanted to see if you were a Nazi, and you are, unfortunately.”
    — Professor, Psychology, on Stanley Milgram's obedience study

85. “I like economics.”
    — Professor, Economics, on economics

86. “I worked as a mental health worker, which comes in handy when dealing with all of you.”
    — Professor, Political Science

87. “If you want a passive aggressive gift for a parent with a young child, give them a marching band.”
    — Professor, Psychology, on cognitive development

88. “Let's talk about mosquito sex!”
    — Professor, Biology, on the social processes of animals

89. “For this example, let's ignore what women want.”
    — Professor, Economics, on the deferred acceptance algorithm

90. “There's no eating in this lecture hall...so I hope you all leave no trace.”
    — Professor, Chemistry, while handing out crème brûlées

On Music and Humanities

91. “She's vocally abusing her daughter.”
    — Professor, Music, on Mozart's Queen of the Night aria

92. “It was against every fire marshal law, but it was great to have you all there!”
    — Professor, Music

93. “You can talk about your musical childhood trauma in your presentations.”
    — Professor, Chinese

94. “Operas are about a soprano and tenor who want to make love, and a baritone who wants to stop them.”
    — Professor, Music, from the words of George Bernard Shaw

95. “He's challenging him to a duel by biting his ear.”
    — Professor, Music, on Don Jose in Bizet's Carmen

96. “It's remarkable how many Taylor Swift songs are about breakups.”
    — Professor, Music

97. “See, that was so sexy that you laughed nervously.”
    — Professor, Music, while whispering into a wall

98. “She has a crappy voice.”
    — Professor, Music, on Marilyn Monroe

99. “It's this hormonal, adolescent aria.”
    — Professor, Music, on Cherubino's aria in The Mariage of Figaro

100. “In what other class can you throw your partner's body around and fly?”
     — Dance Historian, on social dance