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- Hey, my name's Harry Melsop.
I'm from Auckland, New Zealand.
I'm a freshman here at Stanford,
studying computer science and economics.
When I'm not in class,
I enjoy riding my bike,
hanging out with friends,
and working on side projects.
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Typical day here at Stanford
starts probably about 10 a.m.,
and I'll head off to class.
My first class is Quarters at 11:30.
From there, I'll usually
grab lunch with friends
over at Tresidder and have
class through to three
or four p.m., then after
that, dinner primarily.
And then, head off to
go and work on homework,
problem sets, or just other
sort of miscellaneous stuff.
Because today's a Saturday, I
don't have class, thankfully,
so I'll spend a bit of
time working on a drone
that I've been working on for
the last seven or eight weeks.
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Alright, so I live in
Roble, which is the oldest
and largest dorm here at Stanford.
I live, because I'm a freshmen,
I'm in a three room quad.
So I've got three roommates in total.
We've got two bedrooms
and this sort of like shared living space
that you're kinda looking at now.
So it's got all of our
desks, that's where I work
over in the corner.
Spend quite a lot of time
here, somewhat unsurprisingly.
Just doing homework, problem sets, coding,
working on projects, as
you can see on my desk,
I've got a robot car and
a drone sitting there,
which I've been tinkering
around with last night.
And yeah, this is just
kind of the center of
the place I spend time at college.
- [Interviewer] So tell
me where we are right now.
- Sure, so we're in the Roble Makerspace.
It was just finished a
couple weeks ago, actually.
This room actually used
to be the game room.
We used to have pool tables and foosball
and stuff in here, but all that stuff
has actually been shifted
out to the lobby now
to make space for this.
So, I mean, the idea of it is
that it's gonna become a space
so people can come and work on things
that maybe aren't so sort
of academic-focused, right?
So they can come and work on,
like what I've come here for,
the robot car, people will, eventually,
there's gonna be canvases over there.
There will be 3D
printers, soldering irons,
that kind of stuff here.
- Oh cool.
So it's like a whole workshop.
- Yeah.
So I believe those things
are actually coming tomorrow.
So we just missed them, but--
- Damn.
- Yeah (laughs).
- But, so tell me about
the projects you work on
outside of class.
- So at the moment,
I'm in an electrical engineering class,
and we're, for the first
part of the quarter,
we were just working on
more of the theoretical side
of electrical engineering, and then, now,
it's culminated in building
some sort of project.
So here, we've got the robot car
that I've been working on
for the last couple of days.
- Right.
- The idea behind this
is that it's gonna be controlled,
or it currently is
controlled through an app
on the smartphone.
- And so, besides the car,
what other sort of projects
are you working on right now?
- For sure, so one of my friends and I
are working on building a drone.
So from scratch, we're tryin'
to pull a drone together
that will be able to autonomously fly
around the Stanford campus.
- So when you say
autonomously flying, you mean
nobody was at the control?
- Nobody's at the controls, yeah.
(drones buzz)
- Spooky.
- Yeah.
- How would you say
your engineering skills
have been changing through this class
and through your own projects?
- I think that projects build
a lot of self confidence
to go out and just start
working on something.
- Mhm.
- Which I really like
because previously,
learning sort of physics
and chemistry and stuff in school,
you learn all about the theoretical stuff,
but it's kinda hard to
know where to even begin
if you wanna put something
together yourself.
So I think that the
classes that I've taken
this quarter in particular
and the UIV club
has really taught me that
you sort of can go out
and look for help online
and just start pulling things together.
- [Interviewer] Yeah, and
you have this great space
to build it all.
- Absolutely.
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Okay, yeah, cool so we're in
the Huang Engineering Building
right now, and there's a
sort of cafe on this level
and everything, but
here, this is reasonably
sort of famous place, it's
a 24/7 video call line
through to MIT, so I've never
actually seen it be used.
But I've heard that people
will sit here and talk
and discuss ideas and stuff
with the guys in Boston all
the way on the other side
of the country.
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- [Interviewer] Outside
of academics and stuff,
what is social life look like
as a freshmen at Stanford?
- Yeah, I mean, you get pretty
close with most of the people
that you live with in the dorm.
People in my hall, stuff like that,
we hang out all the time.
Other than that, something
that was a shock to me
and probably won't be to most people
who have lived in the
States their whole life,
is that sort of the
fraternity and sorority thing.
- Yeah.
- So we don't have that
in New Zealand.
- So would you say
that Stanford has like
a lot of school spirit?
People show up to sporting
games, events, stuff like that?
- This afternoon, for
example, my roommate, Blake,
he's on the gymnastics team here,
and they're hosting the
Canadian-Japanese National Teams
for competitions.
- Mhm.
- So at four o'clock, I'm
gonna head over to that
with a few friends and support him.
Yeah, for sure.
- So there's a lot of stuff
happening on campus.
- All the time, yeah.
- [Interviewer] I guess,
yeah, the challenge
is just you got work to
do, as well as like--
- [Harry] Exactly, it's a
constant balancing act, yeah.
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- [Interviewer] So academically,
why did you pick Stanford?
- Sure, I mean, going into the sort
of University application
process, I knew I was
quite interested in technology.
I enjoyed engineering sort of
related stuff in high school.
But I also really liked economics
and really interested in entrepreneurship
and potentially trying
to do that kind of stuff
into the future, so Stanford
sort of stuck out to me as
a natural choice in that regard.
It's in Silicon Valley, it's renowned
for it's engineering department.
Good economics faculty, so I thought
that would be amazing,
and I just really wanted
to come here for those reasons, yeah.
- You're looking for a
major in computer science
and maybe a minor in economics.
- Yes.
- What would the requirements
for that look like if
you're gonna pursue that
all the the way through?
- Yeah.
So with the computer science department,
there are six classes in particular,
which are sort of like
the core behind that,
and then, after that, you take
a whole bunch of electives.
Because I think I wanna pursue
the artificial intelligence
track, that means taking
a lot of classes in A.I.
- Right.
- And linear algebra, stuff like that.
For economics, to be totally honest,
I haven't looked super carefully
into exactly what classes
I need to take, I know
what my sort of runway
for the next year looks
like in terms of classes.
But once I fulfill that
Calculus prerequisite,
then I can actually start
really getting through
to economics courses.
- Cool, so it sounds
like you have a lot of math to do,
and then, you'll be able to branch out
and study a little bit more specifically
what you wanna study.
- Exactly.
And that's something that
I really like about here
is that you really have an
enormous amount of freedom.
So there are some prerequisites like math,
but really, you can, as long
as you fulfill the requirements
before you take the class, you
can take anything you'd like,
which is really cool.
- Well, cool.
That was awesome.
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Why did you decide to
go abroad for college,
as opposed to staying in New Zealand?
- Yeah.
I mean, in part, it was
because I really wanted
to come here in particular.
So coming to Stanford was
my dream for the reasons
that we went over about earlier.
I love the place it's in.
Also, my parents were always
really strong proponents
of going away for University.
Both of them
went to different places
from where they grew up,
and they thought that was a
really good experience to have.
So I was of and am of the same opinion
that it's a good idea
to go away somewhere.
And there's nowhere much
better than California.
- Yeah, so what do you think
you gained specifically
from moving away from where you grew up
to go for higher education?
- So on like a sort of
personal development level,
there's a lot of independence
that you get, so where I'm from,
if I'd chosen to go to
university in New Zealand,
I likely would've stayed in
Auckland where I grew up.
And so, that would've meant
I probably would still be
living at home, so it's
forced me to make new friends.
And it's also given me a huge plethora
of new opportunities that I
probably wouldn't have had
had I'd gone home.
I've met really interesting people.
I've gone to places around here
that I never would've otherwise seen.
That class I talked about,
the Space Systems class,
and I've gotten to go and
visit companies I'd otherwise
never would've had that opportunity
to do so.
- Right, right.
- What is really surprising
is that everyone's very busy.
So I before coming here, I imagined myself
every weekend going and doing something.
That really, that isn't quite the case.
There's a lot of work to be done,
but that's probably how it
should be, to be honest.
- Mhm.
- That's not necessarily
been a bad thing.
The people who I've met have been
some of the most interesting
people I've ever met,
and that in some senses,
that was surprising to me
that these people that I met in any sort
or at orientation or whatever,
actually as you sort of
get to know them better,
you unpick what they've done
in the past, who they are,
and that's been really interesting.
And that's been something
that I couldn't do so much
in high school because you
don't live with those people.
- Right.
- You're friends with them
at school and whatever, but really,
living with other students
and the students here who
have probably done something
or another that's been interesting
and therefore influential
in their life and unpicking what that was,
that's been really interesting.
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