Stanford students want in on the military tech gold rush

After taking the popular class “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms” in 2022, Ganesan became hooked on defense tech. She cofounded the student group Stanford Women in National Security , or WINS, which now has more than 150 members, and completed summer internships at the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. When Divya Ganesan, a senior studying political science, started at Stanford in 2021, she didn’t dream of one day working in national security. Back then, defense intelligence companies that contract with the government, like Palantir, were “super looked down upon” on campus, she said. “They were seen as the evil guys.” At Stanford, building tech for the U.S. government is cool again. Students are dropping out to form defense tech startups and compete for coveted internships at government security agencies or major private contractors. Undergraduates, business school students, recent alumni now working in defense tech, and faculty show a boom ... Read full article.