Saket Vora

Due to my procrastination, this post is just now being written. First week of classes has come to an end, and I think it’ll be a good quarter.

Nader was a champ and despite me waiving him off any need to pick me up in the morning from SFO, he came anyway and brought some falafel for brunch too. Didn’t have class for a few hours still, so I unpacked and then headed to the transportation office to pick up my new parking pass — the one on my car had been expired for almost a month but I never got a ticket! Went to my only MW class – Intro to MEMS. Greeted a sizable contingent of the ‘Brown Brigade’, the tight knit group of Indian students who have had a lot of classes together. I guess I’m an honorary member or something. I actually fell asleep in class.

On Tuesday I checked out the packed room for the newly offered ‘iPhone Application Class’ in the CS dept. It’s actually taught by two Apple engineers, but they were sharp and knew how to teach. I left early to get to my corporate finance class (or ‘Finance for Non-MBAs’ taught at the GSB. The professor seems quite good. When explaining the structure of the financial markets, she had to interject with “well, apart from last week” on several occasions. I hopped over to the Main Quad for Hindi class and ran into Amit – sweet, he’s taking this too! We decided to come back for the later section and had a coffee at the newly opened Coho (coffee house, i dunno, that’s just what they do here).

Wednesday morning I got to meet Ben Abrams, someone that Naman met at a retreat a few weeks ago and someone who knows Andrew, Brent, and even my friend Donny! He did his undergrad at Duke and a Master’s at NC State in transportation systems, with a focus project in rapid bus transit. He got an opportunity to join the The Wesley Group as a venture analyst, and took it. Great guy — worked on the Full Belly project and the Millenium Village initiative while at Duke and is a big Obama supporter. Notice a trend? I love meeting people like this!

After E240, upon biking over to the bookstore, I ran into Siddharth (my lab partner in EE 414) and Sudeep (my teammate in Strategy class). Sudeep was at DHL in Ft. Lauderdale using his decision analysis and optimization skills to help rework DHL’s entire continental distribution scheme, and Siddharth got to spend the summer getting chummy with Dr. Lee (i’m quite jealous). Then Pratik (teammate and friend from entrepreneural finance) strolled by and we all went to the bookstore for coffee and a long chat. Funny how you intend on doing ‘work’ then this happens. I certainly don’t mind.

At 7 there was a Stanford Democrats / Stanford for Obama meeting. Obviously tilted undergrad, but the room was packed. I came away very impressed with the level of organization and focus this chapter has — they know the focus is on absentee ballots for students from swing states, they are organizing trips every single weekend to Nevada for voter registration drives (I’ll be going one weekend), they are coordinating with organizers to defeat Prop 4 and Prop 8, etc. An alum of the Stanford Democrats who started off as a dorm organizer has fundraised about $150,000 to support student efforts (all trips are covered) and another donor offered a whole floor of a building off University Ave and the highway for a Stanford field office. These people aren’t playing around.