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Sidetracked and Seduced: Technological Trend Hopping at Stanford

stanfordreview.org · 992 words · saved by 1 readers

Last fall, over three hundred Stanford students squeezed themselves into Skilling Auditorium for the first session of Civil & Environmental Engineering 252: Web3 Entrepreneurship. The scarcity of seats did not curb their hopes and ambitions; many leaned against walls and sat cross-legged in the aisles, craning their necks to see slides explaining an entrepreneur’s blockchain-powered brainchild. Nine weeks later, those same students watched in awe as ChatGPT smashed the record for the fastest growing consumer application in history. A shiny new idol for startup-minded students had risen. Like a light switch, winter enrollment for Web3 Entrepreneurship plummeted to only ninety people, and the class was then canceled in the spring. The once voguish course will not be offered this year in any quarter. This is indicative of a larger problem: too many Stanford students pursue a vision of the future dictated by the agendas of others, rather than daring to envision their own fantastic future a

Table of Contents Last fall, over three hundred Stanford students squeezed themselves into Skilling Auditorium for the first session of Civil & Environmental Engineering 252: Web3 Entrepreneurship. The scarcity of seats did not curb their hopes and ambitions; many leaned against walls and sat cross-legged in the aisles, craning their necks to see slides explaining an entrepreneur’s blockchain-powered brainchild. Nine weeks later, those same students watched in awe as ChatGPT smashed the record for the fastest growing consumer application in history. A shiny new idol for startup-minded students

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