The coastal redwood is sequoia sempervirens.

The giant sequoia is sequoiadendron giganteum.

So depending on how you look at it, either species is or ain’t a sequoia or vice versa or both.

As noted in another comment, the genus of the redwood is Sequoia. The trees with the common name sequoia (which are a different genus) tend to be shorter than redwoods but also much thicker in their trunks. They are native to the mountains further inland (you'll find them in Yosemite as well as (unsurprisingly) Sequoia/King's Canyon National Park). I'm pretty sure that the Stanford tree is, in fact, a Sequoia and not a sequoia.

"Pole" in English is derived [1] from the Latin palus (from whence "palo"). The archaic English word "pale" (also meaning stick or stake) survives in the expression "beyond the pale."

[1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/pole

Poste is post... pole and stick can refer to the same thing.