Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering

https://poetsandquants.com/2025/07/28/the-secret-stanford-program-no-ones-heard-about/

47•curioustock•15h ago

Comments

lisper•15h ago

This particular clickbait title formula -- The X No One Has Heard About -- drives me nuts because it is so manifestly self-defeating. Obviously someone has heard about it. At the very least, the author of the piece has heard about it, and now all of their readers have heard about it too.

cadamsdotcom•14h ago

Ah, the classic “no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” :)

HN titles generally shouldn’t be clickbait.. what would you suggest instead?

lisper•14h ago

In this case I would have gone with something like:

Management Science & Engineering (MS&E): Stanford’s interdisciplinary hub

taude•14h ago

ha, no one would have clicked on that title. Needs some cta and pep in it.

But Claude gives me:

"Stanford's 230-Student Program That Produces More Unicorn Founders Than Most Schools"

"Why Stanford Engineers Are Choosing MS&E Over CS: A Technical MBA That Actually Works"

"Stanford's MS&E: The 7.8% Acceptance Rate Program Behind Instagram, Gusto, and Sourcegraph

"How Stanford's MS&E Became Y Combinator's Secret Feeder Program"

dylan604•14h ago

You could have gone with something a bit catchier, "The Stanford Program that few people know about" which would have the same sentiment and would definitely get more clicks than your suggestion.

lisper•14h ago

I guess that depends on what you think the purpose of these titles is: to get people to click, or to tell them what the article is actually about so they can make an informed decision whether or not to click. If your goal is the former then just go with "The secret to everything! Best article ever written! Must read!" no matter what the actual content is.

dylan604•13h ago

Do you want people to read the thing or not. Giving the exact course name as the title guarantees very few people will read it. Telling the potential reader there's a class few people know about has a better chance. I think we can all agree that the point of any written text is for someone to read it at some point. How many books have titles that are descriptive of the contents and not something just to get you to at least pick it up and read the jacket? How many titles of movies or music albums as well? Just so as we are all clear that your attempt to be pedantic on a title definition was very much ignoring anything but something like a news headline

Obscurity4340•14h ago

This is an extremely amusing turn of phrase

dylan604•14h ago

Oh man, if you liked that, then you should read up on more Yogisms:

https://yogiberramuseum.org/about-yogi/yogisms/

hyghjiyhu•13h ago

> no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded

This seems like a paradox but actually isn't.

The trick is to correctly interpret what is actually being said. No one goes there anymore - this is clearly meant in a casual imprecise way not literally 0. So how can we precisely state what is meant?

I would interpret it as the proportion of some group of people going there is now very low.

On the other hand that it is crowded is a different thing. It says that the absolute number of people going there is too high. Furthermore, those people may be different from the group in the first part.

Two example scenarios:

* None of my friends go there anymore, the number of tourists is too high.

* As the city has grown, the place has reached capacity meaning that a smaller proportion of the city can visit.

alankarmisra•14h ago

It's like the secret beaches in every south-east asian nook and crany. They're so secret there's signs pointing to them every where and they are overrun with tourists.

sas224dbm•14h ago

Tony Wheeler has a lot to answer for

junar•13h ago

Pretty sure any Stanford student would have heard about it. For students graduating in 2023-2024 year, Management Science and Engineering was the 9th most popular bachelor's degree and 7th most popular master's degree.

https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/degrees-conferred

tomhow•13h ago

We've de-baited the title now.

apparent•14h ago

Of the famous founders, over half were Stanford undergrads and therefore likely were "coterm" students. That means they just added a year to their degree and got this degree tacked on. That saves lots of time and money compared to going to Stanford as a master's student. There are a lot of things that are "worth it" if you don't have to move apartments/cities and get it for half the price — but which are not nearly as worth it if you're paying double and add the friction of moving to the area in order to enroll.

m-ee•14h ago

I’m not sure how it factors into the overall admission statistics but getting accepted for a coterm is, or at least was, significantly easier and more straightforward. In my time it just meant a GPA above a certain cutoff, a letter of rec from a professor, and non embarrassing GRE scores. A very good letter of recommendation could make up for deficiencies in the other two. It’s not exactly a super selective elite club like the article implies if you’re already there for undergrad.

TMWNN•14h ago

Can Stanford undergrads coterm in MS&E with any undergraduate major?

m-ee•12h ago

Yes, I knew people who cotermed in MS&E (and other masters programs) with a different undergrad major. I think you just need to make sure you fulfill whatever prereq courses they ask for but my knowledge is old at this point. I imagine you’d be fine going from any engineering major to MS&E, but if you were an English major who happened to take a bunch of math and physics that would probably work too.

constantcrying•13h ago

Maybe it is because I am not from the US and from a country with a very different work culture, but this whole thing seems ridiculously narcissistic. A person with such a degree becoming my coworker or my boss seems like a nightmare. Even talking to someone who "made it through" such a degree is something I would rather avoid.

mocmoc•13h ago

this industry is rotten

lenerdenator•12h ago

Things rot from the head down, and Stanford arguably counts as the head.

coupdejarnac•13h ago

I've taken a few graduate courses at Stanford MS&E through their non degree program, and I give the experience three thumbs up.

curioustock•10h ago

Yes some people actually go NDO->part-time-> full-time. It's rare but possible.

mathattack•13h ago

I've met several of these students. It's like an MBA, but less social networking and more math. (And can be done co-term or in a year)

So does it add some value to someone who is already getting a bachelors in EE, CS or similar? Sure.

Would I put a history major with an MS&E degree in charge of anything significant? Probably not.

I suspect that the admissions rate of 7% is independent of coterms.

TexanFeller•11h ago

> Management Science

It’s jarring and galling to see management and science put together in a way that’s suggestive of management being a science. It reeks of stolen valor.

Obligatory Feynman on “sciences”: https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo?si=SYTZSNA0G-RZDguA

cschmidt•10h ago

I think in this context Management Science is an older term that was synonymous with operations research. The flagship journal of Informs (the institute for operations research and management science) has the same name. Studying how to optimize thing, lots of statistics and math. Stanford was at the forefront of the field from George Danzig onwards. So not trying to make management a “science” in this case.

cschmidt•10h ago

I’m not sure about this masters program, but the undergrad program seems to be proper ORMS.

MADEinPARIS•10h ago

I met a guy who raised $250MM, and dropped out of the program. Spoiled.

fernirello•2h ago

Has anyone seen publicly accessible content from the startup-ish MS&E courses? I think Coursera had a MOOCified version of “Startup engineering”, but that was over a decade ago and it didn’t last long anyway. It was great back then.

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