Stanford is a famous private university in California, about an hour south of San Francisco, in the middle of the area people call Silicon Valley. Its full name is Leland Stanford Junior University, and its campus is unusually large, with sandstone buildings and red tile roofs. It is known worldwide for engineering, computer science, and business, and for how closely it sits with the technology industry around it — a great many well-known companies were started by people who met there. In English you use it as a place name with no "the": she studies at Stanford, he went to Stanford. You will also meet it attached to famous things that came out of the university, such as the Stanford prison experiment in psychology, or Stanford as a name in test titles. For Taiwanese students it is worth knowing that it sits in the same conversation as the Ivy League schools in terms of difficulty and reputation, even though it is on the west coast and not in that league at all.