Exploring Your Stanford Courses
Feeling uncertain about choosing your Autumn courses? This video series from Academic Advising will teach you how to navigate Stanford's many course offerings. (You must sign in to Google Drive with your @stanford.edu email address to watch.)
2024-2025 Video Series
Introducing Academic Advising (6:33)
In our first video, we'll introduce you to Academic Advising, explore the different kinds of advisors who can help you, and give you a glimpse of what's coming ahead in the next few months.
Exploring Your Interests (9:46)
In our second video, we talk about exploring the arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields at Stanford, as well as what it means to study each of these disciplines.
Resources for Choosing Courses (11:25)
In our third video, we discuss frosh-friendly introductory courses, courses for pre-med students, placement tests and diagnostics, exploring majors and major requirements, and other useful tools to help you choose your courses.
Demystifying Stanford Courses (10:12)
In our fourth video, we explain how Stanford courses work: how courses are structured, what course numbers mean, what your grading options are, what a course "unit" is, and how many units you should enroll in total.
Autumn Course Planning (14:04)
In our final video, we'll take a look at how to use the course catalog, considerations for choosing your Autumn quarter courses, and some sample course schedules to help you get started.
If you are having trouble viewing these videos, please make sure you are signed out of any personal Gmail or Google accounts and only signed in to your Stanford Google Drive account. On the "You need access" screen, click on the address that appears below "You're signed in as," and log in with your @stanford.edu email address.
Links mentioned in these videos:
- The Academic Advising website
- Introductory Seminars (Introsems)
- Introductory Courses in the Humanities
- Or type the special tag HUMSCI::humanities directly in the search bar of ExploreCourses
- You may also want to check out our page on Getting Started in the Humanities for even more opportunities!
- Doerr School of Sustainability, Departments and programs
- STEM Roadmap
- Finding Opportunities in the Arts
- Pre-Med Information
- Placement Tests
- Explore Majors
- Stanford Bulletin
- ExploreCourses and Navigate Classes (the official course catalogs)
- Stanford Syllabus
Ready to Learn More?
Check out the Current Students section of our website for more resources on choosing courses, advice on exploring majors, answers to frequently asked questions about your academics and requirements, and much more!