Man Reveals How He And His Friend 'Snuck' Into Stanford Class For Free: 'We Went And Asked Professor..'

Many young students in India dream of studying abroad and hope to join prestigious colleges in the United States of America. However, not everyone’s dream comes true. But, one Indian co-founder discovered a unique way to get a glimpse of one of the most reputed universities. Recently, Mukul Rustagi, co-founder of Classplus, shared his inspiring story of sneaking into a class at Stanford University with his business partner, Bhaswat Agarwal. Despite not having good grades and funds in their youth, they always wanted to experience Stanford’s charm firsthand.

In an Instagram video, Rustagi explained their bold move to sneak into a class, which turned out to be a finance lecture, which coincidentally aligned perfectly with their interests. At the end of the class, Rustagi even took a marker from the professor as a souvenir.

Rustagi explained, “So my co-founder and I had a dream to visit Stanford once. Because when we were studying in college, we used to say, ‘Let’s go abroad and do an MBA.’ Then we realized that doing an MBA abroad costs around 2 Crore. Financially, we couldn’t afford it, and our grades weren’t good enough in college for Stanford to accept us. So we said, ‘Let’s go to Stanford and see what they teach there.’ It was a beautiful campus, we walked about 1-1.5 km, no noise from outside, and 90% of the campus was green. We searched for Stanford’s business school on that campus.”

“So we saw that there was a class going on. We went very politely to the professor and told him, ‘Since childhood, our dream has been to go to a college like Stanford, but we never got the opportunity.’ We were extremely happy that the professor allowed us and life is such a sweet romantic irony that class turned out to be a finance class and the topic of the day was, ‘How to evaluate mergers and acquisition.’ We went for the thrill, but actually, we came back learning something because coincidently, that class was exactly about the topic that we as founders are always thinking about,” Mukul Rustagi added.

Rustagi concluded by explaining that when they were leaving, they asked the professor if they could take the marker from the class as a memento. The professor agreed and they still carry that marker in their bag.

Reacting to the clip, a user shared, “You can attend classes without enrolling in them. That’s normal at unis in the US.” Another jokingly asked, “ID card ke bina entry kaise ki? (How did you manage to enter without an ID card?)” “Aur ek India ki university hai, apne hi college ke dusre class me sneak karne nahi dete. (And then there’s Indian university where they don’t let you sneak into your own classes),” a comment read.

Another wrote, “God’s plan for you guys.” One more added, “That’s the reason they are no 1.”

Since Mukul Rustagi shared the clip on Instagram, it has gone viral and garnered over 3 Lakh views.