Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, founded by Leland Stanford, and his wife, Jane Stanford, and named in honor of their deceased teenage son in 1891, is one of the United States' most prestigious universities, situated near Palo Alto on the San Francisco Peninsula. The campus covers over 8000 acres, making it one of the largest campuses in the world. Stanford also played an important role in the development of Silicon Valley, with alumni such as the founders of Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo. Indeed, Sun originally stood for Stanford University Network!

There are approximately 6,500 undergraduates at the university. The graduate schools include Stanford Law School, Medical School, Graduate School of Business, School of Earth Sciences and School of Education. The School of Humanities & Sciences and Engineering have both graduate and undergraduate programs.

The Stanford University Libraries (SUL) have a collection of more than 8 million volumes.

Stanford's teams are called the Cardinal (the color, not the bird). The school's unofficial mascot is the Tree, which is part of the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band (LSJUMB). Stanford's athletic teams participate in the NCAA's Division I-A and the Pacific Ten Conference. Stanford's traditional sports rival is UC Berkeley.