A student sleeping in class would usually be cause for concern. For Stanford senior Hoang D. Nguyen, it’s part of his undergraduate coursework.
“Once, our professor had a student sleep in front of the entire class, and we had to study their brainwaves,” Nguyen said.
The course is part of Symbolic Systems, the program Nguyen is majoring in. Known among students and staff as SymSys, the program studies the human mind through various interdisciplinary humanities and STEM-based lenses, particularly its intersection with technology.
Michael Frank, director of the program, said its academic core is cognitive science.
“Symbolic Systems is what some universities call cognitive science, but it’s our unique Stanford blend of cognitive science that emphasizes a bunch of different elements that aren’t as present in all CogSci programs,” Frank said.
Specifically, Frank said the program grapples with both human and computer intelligence.
“SymSys deals with what we call minds and machines,” Frank said. “It’s got both a formal element and an empirical element, as well as philosophical and computational pieces. You can use SymSys to ask questions about how minds work, like neuroscience or cognitive science with empirical studies of humans or animals, or you could look at artificial minds like artificial intelligence.”
In recent years, SymSys has focused more on AI. According to Frank, the program not only highlights how to build artificial intelligence but also how to understand it and what its relationship with people is.
“SymSys provides a really good foundation and starting point for people who are interested in all aspects of AI, not just how to construct intelligent agents but also how to study them, how to understand them, how they compare to humans and their impact on society,” Frank said. “We have concentrations that deal with AI, including a standard artificial intelligence concentration that focuses on technical aspects, and a human-centered artificial intelligence concentration that emphasizes interaction with humans and the ways AI can shape society.”
And as AI becomes more intertwined with everyday life, SymSys has become more popular with the Stanford student body.
“We are now in the top five majors at Stanford,” Frank said. “We’ve experienced tremendous growth over the past ten years.”
Nguyen is one student who’s part of that boom. Currently an advising fellow in the program, Nguyen said he found the major while browsing through college programs and thought it matched his processes.
“I found SymSys through general college research,” Nguyen said. “I was interested in computer science, and Stanford is a fantastic school, so I stumbled onto the SymSys website. It felt more oriented toward the humanities than I expected, but it was so interdisciplinary that it could still be technical.”
Nguyen said the major’s structure makes it easy for students to lean in different directions.
“SymSys is very choose your own path,” Nguyen said. “I value being technical a lot, so my plan has the CS core, but it intersects with philosophy and linguistics. You can take the SymSys core as technical or as theoretical as you want.”
But despite the variability, Nguyen said the classes are often predictably structured.
“Many quarters are formulaic,” Nguyen said. “It’s one CS class, one math class, one philosophy class, and one linguistics class, and then maybe a class for fun.”
Nguyen says the coursework within his classes is also diverse, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of SymSys.
“A CS class is usually a weekly problem set with programming and a write-up,” Nguyen said. “Math is a problem set. Philosophy is a paper, and sometimes your midterm is a longer paper. Linguistics depends; some give problem sets and some assign papers. It sits in between.”
That diversity extends to the student body, which Nguyen describes as a community of students who might have gone to different academic institutions if not for SymSys.
“A lot of people in SymSys are people from CS who find themselves more interested in the theoretical and philosophical side,” Nguyen said. “And there are people from cognitive science and psychology who want to get more technical. That mix is one of the main reasons I chose it.”
However, Nguyen said the major can feel less socially cohesive due to the wide range of pathways, especially compared to other departments where everyone takes the same sequence of courses together.
“One of our bigger weaknesses is a strong sense of community because it’s so interdisciplinary,” Nguyen said. “You take classes in other departments like Computer Science or Philosophy, so it takes a while to figure out who’s actually SymSys. It’s not always like, ‘I’m a SymSys student and I know everybody else.’”
Still, something that Nguyen said is universal among the students despite their different tracks is learning about AI.
“AI is a huge focus of SymSys,” Nguyen said. “Not only just the technical aspect of it, but there tends to be a lot of the philosophy classes with conversation on whether or not large language models have consciousness, and do they have the same moral implications.”
Frank said the program’s interdisciplinary approach towards AI helps equip students with the skillset to understand the implications of modern AI tools.
“I think the discussion of modern AI systems illustrates that a lot of people are trying to understand, what is an artificial agent?” Frank said. “What does that even mean? How do they connect to humans? You get these extreme positions and lack of clarity on how they relate to the ways we’ve conceptualized intelligence and meaning and language and so forth. And so that history of cognitive science and philosophy, as well as precursors to modern AI, help us understand these topics and parse those discussions and come up with sensible responses.”
Frank said that SymSys students can leverage their skills across a wide variety of careers in the professional world.
“We have a lot of folks going to tech, both going to establish companies and working as founders of startups. And we also have a lot of folks who go into academia, but one of the fun things about having such a diverse group of students is that we also have folks doing public service. We have attorneys, we have science fiction authors, artists, just a really remarkable group. So there’s certainly concentration in tech and academia, but many other areas as well,” Frank said.
Nguyen said that the interdisciplinary skills SymSys teaches is why alumni can have such different jobs.
“At Stanford, a lot of people like going for the computer science track and then go into similar things a CS person would go to like software engineering or AI, but a lot of academia-oriented people use SymSys as a springboard into research,” Nguyen said. “Some people use it to go into consulting or product management. You’re taught the skills to do any of that.”
But Frank also attributed the mindset of students within the program as a reason.
“The kind of student who usually chooses SymSys is somebody who’s interested in a lot of things and is excited about making connections between them,” Frank said. “What’s challenging is you have to do hard stuff in a lot of different domains. Writing a rigorous philosophy paper is challenging in a different way than doing a coding problem set or a proof in formal logic, because it stretches your mind in many directions.”
