Sigh...I emailed Trevor last year about my desire to work there but never heard back from him. Now that I'm going to Stanford's ME grad program this fall maybe I can weasel my way into some other robotics startup...
Companies are generally very open to collaborate with universities. I've been on both sides of this for robotics -- doing research at CMU and doing research at robotics companies.
The best approach would be to troll available grants, pick something that you think would be fun to work on, and work on a proposal with a company.
Some grants are really easy to get, like SBIRs. Some are designed for collaboration between universities and companies, like STTRs.
If you're a self-funded student, you should seriously consider working on whatever you find most interesting, and dedicating serious time to it. Inferior alternatives include focusing on classes and splitting time among a few projects. The ideal grade in a class is the minimal grade needed to pass. That means you're actually spending time on research.
Contact companies you think might be interested, and ask what they'd like to see made. Treat it like market research, and not a sales pitch. Don't even ask about a job. Making good things is all you need to do to get a good job.
Proposal writing is also a good way to practice both technical writing and product design.
Thank you for the excellent suggestions! I've been working on bigger DoD contracts at my current job, so I'm pretty oblivious to the small company/university grant process.
Since I'm entering Stanford with the intent to obtain a terminal Master's, I'm not sure how much research I'll be allowed or encouraged to participate in. Continuing for my Doctorate is certainly still an option, but I think I'm leaning towards getting my Master's and finding/founding some small company to work with.
Any other insight you have into my situation would be appreciated!
If you don't want to do pure research for more than a few years, don't bother with a PhD. Building real things is more valuable. If you happen to be researching something very related to the real world, like some farm robot or robo soccer, you can trust a PhD will demand enough practical and operational skills to be useful even if you don't continue doing research.
Big defense projects are very, very different than SBIRs and STTRs.
Most importantly: you don't need permission to do cool work. It would be better to add a semester and do research than to just do coursework. I can't stress this enough.
They should totally have apprenticeships, it results in cheaper labor with more focus on your technologies in the long run. Take Zoho for example, they recruit kids who are still in high school to become programmers for them.
This is slightly off-topic, but is there no way (yet?) to browse jobs on snaptalent? I can't even get their widget to load in my browser on sites that have it, for some reason (Firefox and Opera on Linux).
Sites like Monster are plagued by hordes of pizza-delivery boys who apply for programming jobs because all they have to do is click a button. I think the whole idea behind Snaptalent is that jobs ads only appear to targeted audiences, so the delivery boys never see them unless the delivery boys read news.yc.
