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Comment by jefft255 | Hacker News Reader

Also, there's something I don't get: how does an undergrad ends up teaching a full blown course at Stanford? Especially considering she doesn't seem to be some kind of super genius, only a probably excellent student. I'm not trying to demotivate her, I actually think it's amazing that he/she is doing this, but how did this happen?

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I have the same background as the author, but a few years older.

Stanford undergrads and grads alike can teach a course as long as they have (1) the necessary background, (2) passion and proficiency in the tech, and (3) motivation to teach and manage course overhead.

Being a "super genius" doesn't correlate with being informative and having intrinsic instructional value.

I totally agree with your last point, and I wish more university acknowledged this when deciding who teaches classes. My favourite CS course was taught by a first year MS student. For most universities though, letting an undergraduate teach a class is a no-no and it surprises me that Stanford, one of the most prestigious university in the world, would make an exception to that.

Edit: Commenter above clarified to me that the student is not teaching a full blown 3 unit course.

The author seems to be teaching a "student-initiated course." Many universities give students to teach a 1-unit course that is not really part of the mainstream curriculum and does not really count toward the degree.

Same happened to me on a big European technical University. I pushed for adopting a new course, I was the world expert in it, I thought the class for 10 years until someone in the government pushed for a real professor. Now they have another guy who is much less qualified than me, but I was very happy and successful in the private industry instead. And in the end I thought in 3 different universities.

I don't know about Stanford in particular, but my experience so far has been that if you just volunteer to do stuff (and maybe have rear cover from one higher-up, but that's often not really required), and don't need any budget, people just let you do stuff.

At work, I started a study club, and started teaching a programming course, all on company time. No pre-approval. Nobody objected.

And the universities I've been to tend to be even more liberal than companies in such matters.

So an undergrad teaching a course doesn't seem questionable to me.

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