MS&E Newsletter December 2025

Our lead story: MS&E's employment report

Each year, we survey MS&E graduates to find out where they're going as they receive their degrees. For the past three years, we've also asked about their internship experiences. The MS&E employment report paints a robust picture that now includes data from the Class of 2025. A few highlights:

Finance continues to be a growing area of interest
We ask both what type of organizations our grads join and what type of roles they go into. For both undergraduate and master's grad respondents, the most popular combination is financial roles at financial organizations. Although for master's grads, engineering & technology firms are a close second.

This is consistent with our experience in the department, where students have been expressing an increased interest in financial knowledge and techniques for a handful of years. In fact, to help meet that demand, we hired two new faculty members this year with expertise in different areas of finance: Readers of our October newsletter might remember new Assistant Professors Ruizhe Jia and Renyuan Xu.

As we look toward the future, we're also seeing an increased interest in AI-focused and supply-chain-related careers, as well as Chief of Staff roles.

Internships lead to jobs, more so for undergrads
Over 50% of undergraduate respondents went into a job at an organization they previously interned with, and about 36% of master's grads did the same. We saw a slight increase, in both populations, of those who continued on to graduate school, so some of those grads might also eventually have a role where they interned.

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The Latest in MS&E

Energy & Environment

• A study, co-authored by Professor (Teaching) John Weyant, shows California can go carbon-free mostly using current and emerging solutions. But to get there, it must overcome regulatory challenges and scale technologies at an unprecedented pace.
• At the Southeast Asia Summit on Prosperity and Sustainability, former Adjunct Professor James Ellis discussed how the region can meet future energy demands sustainably and securely.
• Land plays an important role in climate, biodiversity, and people's lives, but what exactly are the interactions at play? Kate Calvin (PhD '08, MS '05), former Chief Climate Scientist at NASA, offers an explainer, originally published in Frontiers for Young Minds.
• John Taggart (PhD '19) is co-founder of WeaveGrid, one of nine climate tech startups with Stanford roots recognized on Congruent Ventures' "50 by 2050" list of organizations that may significantly advance global decarbonization.

AI & Data Science

• AI adoption is a behavioral science problem, not just a technological one, argues PhD student Devesh Narayanan in HBR (login may be required).
• Wikipedia articles, similar to ChatGPT’s responses, have seen a decline in readership since the AI chatbot's launch. Hannah Li (PhD '22) shares the implications of this change on YouTube—and for those who prefer to read, in an article in The Wall Street Journal (login may be required).
• Career pivot: Krish Chelikavada (MS '22) describes his journey from crypto to building AI tools in Tech Times.
• Low-cost, lower-waste R&D: New research co-authored by Kibibi Moseley (MS '04) allows chemists and materials scientists to create simulations faster and more accurately than prior methods.

Informing Policy Decisions

• The course Silicon Valley & the U.S. Government, co-led by Adjunct Professor Steve Blank and Adjunct Lecturer Eric Volmar (PhD '21), offers insights into how tech and public service leaders are collaborating to tackle today's most pressing challenges.
• Is your organization prepared for the next "big one"? Adjunct Lecturer Blake Johnson and other experts discuss how to disaster-proof the supply chain in Supply & Demand Chain Executive.
• PhD student Grace Guan discusses her research optimizing the allocation of donated organs in the U.S. health care system, as well as the value of the Stanford Data Science Scholars program.
• Elisa Long (PhD '08, MS '05) will serve as faculty director of the Center for Healthcare Innovation at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Her research develops data-driven models of health care systems to improve decision-making.
• August 2025 marked 20 years since Hurricane Katrina. In this video, learn how Quintus Jett (PhD '99, MS '93) drew on his interdisciplinary training to help increase the efficiency of disaster recovery volunteers and gather data that aided the recovery effort.
• Odes to research: A special collection of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery on the value of federally funded research was launched by an article co-authored by Eric Horvitz (PhD '90). And Tim Wu (MS '23) discusses how to bring fundamental research to the world at large in Entrepreneur UK.

The Future of Organizing

• Professor Emeritus Bob Sutton shares advice on the best ways to break bad news as a leader in HBR (login may be required).
• Across almost all industries and organizations, bad meetings are unavoidable. But they don't have to be, says Rebecca Hinds (PhD '22, MS '14, BS '13) on UC Berkeley's The Culture Kit podcast.

Alumni Stories & Voices

Events

Career Events

Each quarter, MS&E hosts workshops, informational sessions, networking events, and more to help students make informed decisions about their future careers. Many thanks to the following alums for hosting events this quarter: Evan Appel, Samuel Barry, Grant Schooling, and Vincent Tong.

We also hosted an internship panel—with current students Trent DiCicco, Baani Leen Kaur, Logan Lau, and Olivier Pont—a professional photography day, and several educational info sessions with organizations interested in recruiting our students.

Are you an alum who is interested in hosting a workshop for MS&E students? Contact Lindsey Akin.

Reunion Homecoming

During Reunion Homecoming weekend, we hosted a poster session for alums to learn about our PhD students' research in AI and a discussion where students talked about their experiences in AI-related internships.

Thank you to PhD students Andrei Graur, Yingxi Li, Wenqian Xing, and Wanqiao Xu for presenting their research, and to master's students Thomas Sarda and Erica Zhao for sharing their internship experiences with alums.

MS&E Reading List