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by apetresc 3239 days ago
What I don't understand is how you get a gig teaching a course at Stanford while being an undergraduate student at Stanford. Is this some sort of special seminar course or something?
3 comments

I come from a similar background as the author - BS/MS in Stanford CS, but I left just as the deep learning craze was booming.

Stanford allows undergrads to propose and teach some of these more "practical" courses for upcoming technologies - a few examples are classes for NodeJS, cryptocurrency, Spark, and this one for Tensorflow. It's student-lead, very hands-on, and intended to give a specific industry experience.

The classes the author mentioned are first year pre-requisites for the AI specialization and doing research at labs, and gives enough background for a student to be instructive when explaining concepts such as perceptrons and svm's, without necessarily the mathematical rigor. This is the level needed to interact with Tensorflow.

I didn't come off of this article feeling very impressed with Stanford's CS department. Someone with contextual knowledge please explain why I am wrong.

I've had my own calculus / discrete math / math for bio courses before but that was after several years as a doctoral student and TA at Georgia Tech. I can't imagine that there isn't a PhD candidate with more experience under their belt both teaching and using TensorFlow. The author even admits they volunteered to teach the course to stimulate learning the material themselves.

Thanks, this makes a lot more sense, my impression from the post was that this was a normal CS course.
It's probably not a standard course or Stanford is experimenting with practical student-led courses. Why not? I'd do the same...
it's a 'student initiated course. MIT and I believe other colleges offer them -

https://registrar.stanford.edu/staff/student-initiated-cours...