This year, Stanford University topped our lists as the the best and most selective college in the US. As such, it attracts an extremely talented and intelligent study body.
The northern California university has educated household names including Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, golf legend Tiger Woods, and US President Herbert Hoover.
Surprisingly, many of Stanford's most successful students never actually finished their degrees: 11 of the 30 people to make our list never crossed the podium to receive their diploma, but instead left the university to pursue already promising careers.
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Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snapchat, runs his multi-billion dollar company with a former fraternity brother, Bobby Murphy. Spiegel dropped out of school in 2012, just before receiving his degree, in order to dedicate himself fully to Snapchat. He has turned down multiple buy-out offers for the company.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
Source: Forbes, Business Insider
Reese Witherspoon began acting at the age of 12 and attended Stanford University for only one year in 1994 before dropping out to pursue her career, which had her flying to Hollywood every weekend while in school.
Jason Merritt/Getty Images
Source: Huffington Post
Tiger Woods' golf career was already off to an impressive start while he was a student at Stanford University, where he won numerous awards. Woods studied economics for two years, and left the university in 1995 to play golf professionally.
David Cannon/Getty Images
Source: Stanford Men's Golf, Time
Google CEO Larry Page met his co-founder Sergey Brin in the computer science department at Stanford, where they collaborated on the algorithm that would soon become Google. In 1998, the duo dropped out of the graduate program in order to run their new company.
Getty / Justin Sullivan
Source: Business Insider, Wired
Sergey Brin was a Ph.D candidate at Stanford University before he and Larry Page founded Google in 1998. Today, he runs Google X, which focuses on the company's more secretive and risky ventures, such as the recently delayed Google Glass.
Steve Jennings / Getty Images
Source: Forbes
Chelsea Clinton spent her time at Stanford under little scrutiny from the media and graduated in 2001 with a BA in history. Though she was originally interested in medicine, she now works alongside her parents at the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.
The first woman on the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor graduated from Stanford Law School in 1952 and found herself in public service due to necessity, as she described in her 2004 commencement address: "The gender walls that blocked me out of the private sector were more easily hurdled in the public sector."
Reuters/Jeff Topping
Source: Supreme Court of the United States, Stanford News
Mukesh Ambani is India's richest person and the chairman, managing director, and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Limited. After graduating from the University of Bombay with a degree in chemical engineering, he attended Stanford University's business school before leaving in 1981 to work at RIL.
Reuters/Amit Dave
Source: Forbes, Rediff India Abroad
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer spent her first year at Stanford University as a pre-med student, but grew bored of rote memorization and instead sought a major that would stimulate her problem-solving skills. She fell in love with computer programming, graduating with a BS in 1997 and an MS in 1999.
Co-founder of PayPal Peter Thiel is wary of technology, despite the fact that much of his success has been thanks to technological investment. He received a BA in philosophy from Stanford University in 1989 and went on to graduate from Stanford Law School in 1992.
Reed Hastings is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Netflix. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1983, he went on to teach math in Swaziland for two years as a member of the Peace Corps. Afterwards, he earned a master's degree in computer science from Stanford in '88.
Steve Ballmer left Stanford's Graduate School of Business in 1980 to join Microsoft, a decision that paid off for the man who would become the company's CEO from 2000 to 2014. After retiring, Ballmer purchased the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion and is now owner of the team. He also lectures in economics at Stanford.
In his 2014 commencement address to Stanford's MBA graduates, Phil Knight said, "This magical place ... is an extended part of me." Knight built Nike from a business plan he developed for an entrepreneurship class in his second year at Stanford. He graduated with his MBA in 1962.
Before becoming the first black senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker earned degrees in political science and sociology from Stanford, in 1991 and 1992. While in school, he made the All-Pacific Ten Academic Team, played varsity football, was elected senior class president, and won the James W. Lyons Award for Service.
Rachel Maddow first found herself in the media spotlight as a freshman, when she and a friend did an interview with the school newspaper about being the only two gay freshmen on campus. She graduated in 1994 with a degree in public policy and today hosts a nightly talk show on MSNBC.
（文章来源：Business Insider）
