Stanford is easily considered the best college in the west. It's also the best in the country, taking the No. 1 spot on our list of the Best Colleges in America this year.
Known in particular for its exceptional computer science and engineering programs, Stanford is an active hub for talented and impressive students in all fields, from art to tech to business.
We've profiled 15 incredibly impressive undergrads at this top "dream college". They're starring in feature films, playing with the U.S. National Soccer Team, teaching kids to code, and a whole lot more.
Catalin Voss developed a facial recognition app that revolutionizes the way we learn.
Class of 2016
By the time he was 15, Catalin Voss produced the No. 1 podcast on the German iTunes store and commuted back and forth between his native Heidelberg and Silicon Valley to work with Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Apple Macintosh computer.
By freshman year he founded Sension, a visual interface company seeking to revolutionize the way we learn. Voss and his team of roughly eight employees developed a lightweight facial recognition software, one that could track and understand many points in a person's face.
Their software can be used in testing and web lectures to improve the user experience (it might prompt you with a question if it senses you're not paying attention, or explain something further if you appear confused), and provide analytics to instructors about which test questions stumped students the most. Voss expects the product to be adopted by most major standardized test associations and universities in the next year.
His passion project, however, is Sension's groundbreaking Google Glass app, which allows the wearer to recognize people's facial expressions in real-time. It begins clinical trials with young people diagnosed with Autism later this month.
Clancey Stahr raises seven-figure sums as a partner at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
Class of 2015
At 21 years old, you're probably more likely to expect Clancey Stahr to be pitching to venture capitalists, rather than being one. But Stahr has been working at cross-border venture capital firm ZenShin Capital for the last two years, advising startups on product design, business strategy, intellectual property, and general legal advice. He was recently made partner at the firm — the third after the company's two co-founders.
Stahr leads the firm's investments in two major startup clients, Iotera and Simple Emotion, and sits on Simple Emotion's board of directors. Stahr has also raised significant capital, an undisclosed seven-figure sum, for the first close of ZenShin's Core Technology Fund.
School doesn't stop for the Management Science and Engineering major, who still manages to get all his coursework done while working anywhere from 30 to 40 hours a week in Silicon Valley.
Stahr graduates in May and plans to continue in his role as partner at ZenShin, but hopes to someday start his own company.
Garima Sharma is working to end the child bride epidemic in India.
Class of 2015
This past summer, Garima Sharma set off to teach human rights education to girls in Forbesganj, India on a Stanford fellowship. While there, she interviewed 80 mothers in order to better understand why they force their daughters into early marriage.
India is home to 24 million child brides, according to the New Delhi native. The consequences of marrying so young can be devastating: A child bride is twice as likely to suffer from spousal domestic violence and 1.5 times more likely to die in child birth.
"The aspirations that parents have for their daughters shape decisions around education, marriage, and career choices," Sharma says. "I want to better understand the incentives that drive parents' decision-making process[es]." She designed a research study and spent more than 100 hours interviewing the mothers.
Sharma, who also designed and implemented a curriculum to engage adolescent girls in Forbesganj who are at risk of trafficking, plans to pursue a joint MBA/MPA-ID degree and one day run an organization that provides sustainable livelihoods to girls and women in small-town Indian communities.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider