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IT'S EASY to get a
job as a Stanford student. You can hash in Wilbur or shelve
books in Green. The hours are flexible, the pay's usually
decent (starting at $8.75 an hour) and the commute is a
breeze. But what if you want to do something a little
different -- explore an intellectual interest, develop some
VIP connections or spend a lot of time outdoors? With those
criteria in mind, we set out to identify the seven best
student jobs at Stanford.
Some were obvious winners, like riding a mountain bike
around Jasper Ridge, matching up freshman roommates and
romping with 6-year-olds on the shores of Fallen Leaf Lake.
Others took some investigating, but we managed to find a
student whose job carries heavy financial responsibility,
another who meets famous people at work, two students with
an inside look at Stanford's winning sports program, and one
who integrates academic interests into his work. These jobs
aren't always glamorous, and they don't necessarily pay
well, if at all. But those of us who tracked them down --
recalling our own student stints as hashers, ushers, clerks
and driving instructors -- admit it: we're jealous.
Matchmaker, Matchmaker
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 Joe
Narens, '02
job freshman roommate assignment
coordinator
pay $12 per hour plus rent-free summer
housing on campus
I'll never forget the girl who called for
reassurance about living in a four-class house.
After we talked, she told me she loved me.
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Freshman No. 1 is a football player from
Delaware who likes loud music and stays up late.
Housekeeping isn't his strength, but you wouldn't
call him a slob. Freshman No. 2: a South American
artist who enjoys listening to Aerosmith and
debating politics long into the night. He makes his
bed nearly every day.
A good match? The person who put them together
thinks so.
Joe Narens spent last summer pairing off
freshmen. As junior coordinator for the New
Undergraduate Student Information Project, he
hunted for auspicious matches among the 1,758
"preference forms" that recently accepted students
fill out.
Narens, an industrial engineering major, is a
little awed by the impact of his decisions. "It's a
good feeling, but it's also a lot of
responsibility," he says. "To some extent, you're
controlling the fate of the freshmen and who their
friends will be for the next four years."
He sorted the forms last summer with senior
coordinator Chris Walton, '99. (Narens is now the
senior coordinator.) First, they set aside students
requesting ethnic theme houses or special programs
like Freshman/Sophomore College, whose assignments
are handled separately. Next, the forms were
computer-processed to sort students into dorms.
Then the real work began as Narens and Walton went
through each dorm pile, mixing and matching
individuals. Their starting point: aim to match
students from different ethnic groups and
geographic regions (although there are so many
Californians that some inevitably room together).
From there, Narens says, roommate compatibility
often comes down to simple things like bedtimes,
noise tolerance and relative neatness. "The idea is
that you put together people who are different in
background but similar in many of their living
habits," he explains.
During the school year, he got a lot of
questions from roommates who were mystified by what
could have brought them together. One prevalent
theory: "Everyone seems to be matched with someone
who likes the same music," observes Samantha Crow,
a freshman in Donner House. Music is definitely a
factor, Narens says, but in cases where many
students share similar living habits, decisions
hinge on the form's final question, an open-ended
request for likes, dislikes and quirks. This is
where things get interesting. "Someone told us they
drool, and someone put down they like to sleep
naked," he confides.
For Narens himself, the system succeeded. He and
his freshman roommate got along so well that they
now joke about starting a business together in
Silicon Valley. "He's [East] Indian, from
Wayne, New Jersey; I'm Jewish, from Canton, Ohio,"
says Narens. "Right there, there's a lot of
diversity in the room. But we have similar music
tastes, similar habits, both go to bed at
relatively reasonable hours. That's the system for
most people, and it definitely worked for us."
-- Irene Noguchi, '02
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Power Ranger
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 Zoë
Bradbury, '01
job ranger and docent, Jasper Ridge
Biological Preserve
pay $12 per hour
I'll never forget seeing the raw power of
nature when the dam flooded and plumes of water
shot 20 feet into the air.
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If there's a gate unlocked, a trespasser
roaming, a trail littered or a mountain lion on the
prowl, Zoë Bradbury will find it. Known as
"the eyes and ears of the Ridge," Bradbury works at
Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, nearly 12,000
acres of protected open space in the Stanford
Foothills. She has full access to fragile lands
that others see only on guided tours.
As one of 10 rangers at Jasper Ridge, Bradbury
rides her mountain bike on 2 1/2-hour patrols. She
carries a cell phone to call in anything out of the
ordinary -- say, a low-flying helicopter or a
coyote sighting. She also serves as a docent,
leading nature walks across terrain that shelters
thousands of plant and animal species, from great
blue herons to sticky monkey flowers.
Bradbury, an anthropological sciences major from
Langlois, Ore., didn't stumble into her job at
Jasper Ridge. In fact, she transferred from Simon's
Rock College in Massachusetts largely because of
the preserve. "It's a rarity, this place, an island
in the middle of the sprawl of Silicon Valley," she
sighs. "It's food for the soul."
And Bradbury is sharing the feast. Last year,
she dreamed up an environmental program for
Eastside Prep, a private high school in East Palo
Alto. Her idea was to help low-income kids
experience nature firsthand, "giving them a chance
to see science beyond the textbook." Today she
oversees the program -- now two semesters old -- as
part of her job. Bradbury, who hopes eventually to
work in environmental education, won a $30,000
Truman public service scholarship this spring, and
the panel cited her program at Jasper Ridge.
After two years at the preserve, she's still
amazed at being paid to immerse herself in nature.
"It's an enormous privilege," she says, "to have a
key to the gate."
-- Jen Davis, '99
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Coming to You Live
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 Nick
Larson, '02, and Shaumo Sadhukhan,
'01
job KZSU sports broadcaster
pay no salary, but expenses covered
I'll never forget having to broadcast the
early minutes of a game by phone after losing the
connection to the studio.
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It's 52 minutes before tip-off in the women's
basketball game against UC-Berkeley. Players are
taking practice shots. The floor's shaking, and
Smash Mouth's "All Star" is blaring. Stanford coach
Tara VanDerveer is ignoring it all. She's huddled
with KZSU sports reporter Shaumo Sadhukhan, doing a
pregame interview. Sadhukhan observes that Stanford
should win handily over Cal, which is 0-4 in the
Pac-10. VanDerveer is more cautious. "A wounded
bear is a dangerous bear," she warns.
Sadhukhan, from Houston, is one of 10 students
who broadcast Stanford sports live for the campus
radio station at 90.1 FM. He and Nick Larson, from
Seattle, cover women's basketball. They take turns
going to road games and work together at home
games, where Sadhukhan does the play-by-play and
Larson provides color commentary.
It's a fitting division of labor. Before the
game, the energetic Larson hums along with the Band
and talks to himself while scanning media guides as
if he's cramming for a test: "Okay, whadda we got,
whadda we got, gimme a stat." Sadhukhan quietly
studies his handwritten cheat sheets, which list
each player, the pronunciation of her name and
individual statistics.
Once the game starts, Sadhukhan swiftly explains
the action: "Flores has it and will quickly bring
it up and in to Moos. Moos makes a nice catch and
goes in for the layup." Larson, grinning as
freshman Jamie Carey makes two three-point shots in
the first three minutes, declares, "The Cardinal is
having its own competition for the Pac-10 shooting
title." But when the color man starts to gobble up
airtime, Sadhukhan has to scramble to recap the
action. "You've got to get out of the way on some
of this stuff," Sadhukhan tells his partner during
the next time-out.
As broadcasting hopefuls, Sadhukhan and Larson
each spent a year working as a KZSU engineer and
hosting the talk show "Sports Zoo." To refine their
on-air skills, they study tapes of their
broadcasts. "The first time," Larson confesses, "I
sounded like Porky Pig."
Though both now sound like pros, sometimes it's
obvious they're still in school. Larson marvels
that the station covers his road expenses, and
Sadhukhan gushes over the free buffet in the press
room: "Stanford has the best food in the Pac-10. We
have shrimp before every game." No starving
students here.
-- Kathy Zonana, '93, JD '96
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I Have a Dream Job
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 Masud
Shamsid-Deen, '01
job webmaster, Martin Luther King
Jr. Papers Project
pay $10 per hour
I'll never forget hearing some of Dr. King's
most powerful words while choosing sound bites for
the site.
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At first, Masud Shamsid-Deen just wanted to snag
some extra credit. A freshman, he was enrolled in a
spring-quarter class on the African-American
freedom struggle. His professor, Clayborne Carson,
offered one unit to students willing to help
catalog material for the Martin Luther King Jr.
Papers Project, which is based at Stanford and run
by Carson. "I figured, sure, I can use the extra
unit," Shamsid-Deen says.
But once he began rooting around in the nation's
most exhaustive archive of King speeches, letters,
journals and academic writings, Shamsid-Deen was
hooked. He remembers going home to Dallas that
summer thinking he'd like to learn more about the
slain civil rights leader. When he returned to
school the next fall, he e-mailed one of the King
Project's editors, asking for work -- and what
started as a position in computer support became
the job of webmaster for the entire project.
Shamsid-Deen, who had to teach himself web
programming and computer network skills, now spends
about 15 hours a week overseeing an ambitious
website (www.stanford.edu/group/king)
aimed at bringing highlights of Carson's project to
a wider audience. So far, about 600 documents are
online. More than 100,000 people visit the site
each month. "The Internet is the perfect way to get
this information out," says Shamsid-Deen as he sits
at a souped-up Micron Millennia computer in
Carson's third-floor history department office.
"Anyone who wants to find out more about this
historical figure can do it here, without spending
a dime."
He scrolls through some recent additions to the
sprawling site, landing on "An Appraisal of the
Great Awakening," a paper King wrote in 1950 as a
seminary student. It's the kind of in-depth
material Shamsid-Deen says he never encountered
until he joined the project. "I was one of those
people who thought of Dr. King as the man who said,
'I have a dream,' and that was about it," he
says.
Shamsid-Deen is now a junior, and his part-time
job is shaping his academic trajectory. He's
switched his major from economics to history and
pretty much abandoned the idea of a career in
investment banking or consulting. Instead, he's
thinking about graduate school and university-level
teaching.
His young family will likely influence the
decision. As one of about two dozen married
undergraduates at Stanford, he lives in Escondido
Village with his wife, high school sweetheart
Felicia, and their daughter, Melliah, 2. Another
influence will be Carson, who has become a friend
and mentor. Shamsid-Deen has a key to Carson's
office (for access to the computer), and the two
meet weekly. "I'm not being treated like a
student," the webmaster says. "It's more like being
a peer or a consultant."
He thrives on the feedback -- praise and
criticism -- from users around the world. Their
e-mails help Shamsid-Deen decide which documents to
digitize next. He hears from about 100 people a
month -- parents, teachers, college students and
others. "It is amazing," wrote student Katja Galow
in a recent note from Germany. "I found your home
page -- and with it all the stuff I need for my
speech." In other words, Shamsid-Deem now gets more
extra credit than he ever expected.
-- Mark Robinson
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Executive Privilege
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 Sean
Lucy, '99
job president and CEO, Stanford Student
Enterprises
pay $30,000 per year
I'll never forget training full time in
spring of senior year while friends partied and
planned post-graduation vacations.
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At 22, Sean Lucy is CEO of a multimillion-dollar
company. What's more, he gets to park anywhere on
campus for free. What really drives Lucy, though,
isn't the money or the minivan. It's the chance to
spend a year leading a team of 150
entrepreneurial-minded people, most of them
Stanford students.
Lucy heads Stanford Student Enterprises, which
manages the $8 million endowment of the Associated
Students of Stanford University (ASSU). Set up in
1996 as a training ground for student
entrepreneurs, Stanford Student Enterprises also
raises money for the ASSU, which receives no
University funds, by operating services such as
Lecture Notes and Sunday Flicks. On any given day,
Lucy meets with five to 25 people to discuss budget
proposals and financial policies. Though he has
plenty of advisers, it's up to him to call the
shots, whether that means selecting stocks and
bonds to invest in or deciding how to coordinate a
new web project.
"I anticipated the heavy responsibilities," says
Lucy, who had already worked for Stanford Student
Enterprises as projects director and internal
auditor. Those high-powered demands, in fact, were
a major draw. Where else, he reasoned, could an
economics major find such a challenge right out of
school?
He began serious training for the CEO job in the
spring of 1999, working beside his predecessor,
Matt Garlinghouse, '98, instead of schmoozing at
the Goose like most graduating seniors. "I was here
at work for 35 or 40 hours a week. It was a little
tough, because I still had to take classes," he
says. "It wasn't like the 'awesome spring quarter'
of senior year, but I was having a lot of fun doing
it and I don't regret it at all." He moved right
into the leadership post as soon as school was
out.
Today, a year later, Lucy has traded his
schoolbooks for a Filofax. Instead of grabbing a
falafel at a dining hall, he has just come from a
lunch date at Palo Alto's posh restaurant Zibibbo
with John Hall, '94, founder and chairman of the
board of Stanford Student Enterprises. Before
heading into an afternoon forecasting meeting with
the investment directors, Lucy eases into his
swivel chair to plan a staff retreat at Tahoe.
Later, if he has time, he might sneak out to run
the Dish or visit friends who still work at the
Chaparral, which he used to edit. After
work, there's dinner -- probably at Tresidder, he
winces -- and a video with his girlfriend.
In the midst of running the business this
spring, Lucy had to find his own replacement. In
June, when he hands the baton (and the University
minivan) to Colby Elizabeth McGavin, '00, Lucy says
he will remember this as "a great business
education." And, since he plans to work next in a
Silicon Valley start-up, he'll be sure to come back
and visit. Only this time, he'll have to pay for
parking.
-- Sonya Schneider, '00
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A Seat at the Table
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 Aron
Ketchel, '00
job chair, Stanford in Government
pay no salary, but priceless contacts
I'll never forget a dinner for 10 at the
Lakehouse where George Shultz told stories from his
time as secretary of state.
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Aron Ketchel is only 21, but already he has
shared greasy pizza with Milton Friedman, lunched
with Newt Gingrich and heard the inside scoop on
the White House from former chief of staff Leon
Panetta. And he didn't just sit there awestruck.
Ketchel actually challenged Nobel laureate Friedman
with an obscure question on game theory, grilled
Gingrich on health care reform and asked Panetta
how the party that doesn't control the White House
might present a unified message.
He got this extraordinary access through his
post as chair of Stanford in Government, a
nonpartisan student group that brings more
politicos to speak on campus than any other
organization. Of course, everyone's invited to the
big speeches. But Ketchel enjoys face-to-face
contact with many of the speakers before and after
the main events. "You are sitting there with these
people who have made very important decisions,"
Ketchel says. "It's amazing."
He's a natural for the job. As a high schooler
in Tucson, Ariz., Ketchel was already a political
junkie. He served on student council all four years
and as student body president his junior and senior
years. He volunteered at a phone bank for his
Republican congressman, then developed an affection
for moderate Democrats, particularly on social
issues.
Bringing newsmakers to campus isn't Ketchel's
only responsibility. From his office in the Haas
Center for Public Service, he oversees a budget of
$110,000 (drawn from an endowment, student fees and
fund raising) and an organization of 80 active
students. Members work in 11 committees, which do
everything from promoting voter awareness on campus
to encouraging grade-school kids to get interested
in politics. The group's biggest project is
administering a roster of prestigious fellowships,
in which Stanford students earn stipends and do
professional-level work at government offices in
Sacramento, Washington, D.C., and abroad. "My job
is to make sure everyone works together," says
Ketchel, a public policy major who was chosen for
the yearlong post by the outgoing chair last
spring.
Running Stanford in Government, he says, has
helped him develop close ties with several faculty
members, including political science professor Judy
Goldstein and Hoover Institution senior fellow John
Cogan. Both have challenged him to consider other
options before taking the obvious path to law
school. For now, the graduating senior hopes to
parlay his management experience into a key
position at a Silicon Valley start-up -- but it's
hard to imagine him staying out of politics for
long.
-- Christine Foster
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One Happy Camper
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 Karen
Hyun, '00
job counselor and rock-climbing instructor,
Stanford Sierra Camp
pay $4,000 per summer (about half from guest
tips)
I'll never forget coaching a teenage girl
and her crying mom to the top of a towering rock
face.
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It's perfectly calm on Fallen Leaf Lake in the
Sierra Nevada, but down in the shadows under the
dock at Stanford Sierra Camp, the crawdads are
getting nervous. Overhead, a dozen kids sprawl on
the floating platform, wiggling stick-and-twine
fishing poles baited with Gummi Bears, trying to
lure the crustaceans out from under the rocks. As
the first child hauls in his prize, Karen Hyun runs
up with a white bucket. "It keeps the kids occupied
for a good hour," the Stanford senior says,
laughing. "We'll catch about 30 crawdads, and then
we throw them back into the lake so they'll be
there for the next week's campers."
This summer marks Hyun's third and last season
as a staff member at Stanford Sierra Camp, and
already she's feeling nostalgic. No wonder. Nestled
among ancient pines at the edge of the Desolation
Wilderness, the Alumni Association retreat has been
attracting nature lovers for more than 30 years.
Guests are usually alumni and their children, who
sign up for one-week stays. On most days, kids ages
3 and up are placed in the care of 39 undergraduate
counselors while their parents relax or take
student-run lessons in rock climbing, sailing,
tennis and windsurfing. Mealtimes and evenings are
communal, with disco parties, faculty lectures and
talent shows.
Hyun's job typically starts in mid-June, when
she and the 59 other staff members scrub the cabins
in preparation for the first 60 families. For the
next 13 weeks, her main responsibility is to serve
as a pied piper for 5- and 6-year-olds, an age
bracket known in camp parlance as Snoopers. On one
morning, she might take them out on Boatster, the
motorized pontoon. Another day, she and her merry
band might hike to a rock outcropping, where
they'll munch on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches
while Hyun reads them a book about the Berenstain
Bears.
Counselors get great tips and free room and
board, but the most talked-about perk is the
camaraderie that develops among them, Hyun says.
"These are some of the best kids at Stanford," says
the earth systems major from Malvern, Pa. "Some of
my closest friends are the ones I've made at
camp."
Sierra Camp draws more than 200 job applicants
each season. The basic qualifications, says
assistant director Jed Mitchell, '94, are a strong
work ethic, enthusiasm, compassion and sincerity.
He and his six-student interview committee also
look for special talents. "Some people are great
singers, some have a fascination for Eastern
religion, some have spent years designing programs
for kids," Mitchell says. "And some really like to
clean toilets."
Hyun's forte is rock climbing, so she showed the
committee how to tie a climber's
double-figure-eight knot. She spent her first
summer belaying guests at a 70-foot-tall granite
outcropping near camp.
Summers there, says Hyun, have "taught me to be
creative and positive and encouraging, and how to
make people feel comfortable. I've grown more at
camp that any other place I've been." Next year,
she plans to apply some of what she's learned by
working as a substitute teacher. After that, she
hopes to earn her master's in earth systems, then
serve in the Peace Corps for a couple of years.
Eventually, Hyun thinks she might like to be a high
school teacher, specializing in marine science.
But first, one last summer at camp, where she'll
enjoy catching crawdads while she can.
-- Theresa Johnston, '83
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