Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

[Anonymous]

Uh, your ignorance is on display. I’m assuming that the poster meant “American Born Chinese.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Uh, your ignorance is on display. I’m assuming that the poster meant “American Born Chinese.”

That would still be considered Chinese, for application purposes. Now your ignorance is on display.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Uh, your ignorance is on display. I’m assuming that the poster meant “American Born Chinese.”

That would still be considered Chinese, for application purposes. Now your ignorance is on display.

Pp is just explaining the term.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Uh, your ignorance is on display. I’m assuming that the poster meant “American Born Chinese.”

That would still be considered Chinese, for application purposes. Now your ignorance is on display.

He is not Chinese, he is American. Just like your kid is not German, or Irish, or English...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow. Looking at where his classmates got in. No wonder. That’s who he was competing against.

Yup -- rich, connected, smart kids with likely an overrepresentation in computer science applicants because their parents all work in tech. The school sent over 100 students to just Stanford and Berkeley over the last 4 years. No doubt a lot of legacies as well as just some stellar candidates.

There is likely some flukiness to this as well -- probably some combination of schools yield protecting AND having too many highly qualified candidates from the same school. The Ivies, for instance, are a total crapshoot for a candidate like this from a school like this. It's not like they are hurting for CS applicants, and if they get 30 applications from this high school and one of them is interested in majoring in History and plays the oboe, that student will likely standout (assuming excellent test scores and GPA as well). Or you might just have a legacy or two and then that's it because an Ivy isn't going to take 10 kids from one high school in California.

Meanwhile a lot of the state flagships likely viewed him as unlikely to attend based on his background and industry connections. And honestly, were the wrong? If he got into Harvard and Michigan, where would he go?

It's hard to get super worked up about a kid like this. He's fine, he'll be fine. He got into two good schools, he's got massive industry connections, he's clearly very smart and talented and hard working. Does he need an elite school to help pave the way for an elite career? Nope. And they have plenty of other very qualified students applying who will likely get more out of their time there and for whom that degree could transport them to another life.

It don't know what I'm supposed to be worked up about. I also bet you that all those schools that rejected him admitted a large percentage of Asian kids, just FYI.

It’s scary to a lot of people here to see what an actually superior applicant looks like and then they look at how even he couldn’t get into these ridiculous schools.

My friend's son was top of the class at Boston Latin. He was wait listed by all 8 schools he applied, while 6 of his classmates with lesser profiles were admitted by Harvard. The headmaster was shocked. The school went to bat for him, called Cornell multiple times, the family drove there to meet the admission office, and they finally managed to get him off the wait list. It was terrible.

Now we see it happens more and more.

Is your friend's son Asian or white or URM?

As a Cornell grad, this story is depressing. He’d have been a shoe-in in my day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Uh, your ignorance is on display. I’m assuming that the poster meant “American Born Chinese.”

That would still be considered Chinese, for application purposes. Now your ignorance is on display.

He is not Chinese, he is American. Just like your kid is not German, or Irish, or English...

It’s like you don’t understand how college admissions work at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hold up. We all know many students accepted to CS at these colleges (not all of them, but many of them) with similar academic stats and without the addition of his coding and business accomolishments. There is something else going on here.

Honestly sounds like he doesn’t need college at all and I bet that was a factor.

Why admit the guy who is definitely going to drop out year two to run his unicorn startup when you can give the seat and financial aid to someone who actually needs the education?

I’m sure the professors would be thrilled to have him in class as well when he already knows more than them and has superior accomplishments.

It’s a rational admissions decision, candidate is overqualified.

Grades and test scores are irrelevant, candidate is performing as a superior working professional in the field already; put him in the file for faculty hire instead.

Because those drop outs bring the university prestige and often end up donating large amounts of money. If I ran an admissions office, I'd take 100 of those kids before I took any kid who needed massive aid and planed to major in classics or gender studies

I'm guessing this kid wrote something just like that - denigrating the classics and/or gender studies in their Common App essay(s). And then had the applications tossed. Nothing else really explains the outcome except some kind of egregious self-inflicted injury. The "Asian" argument doesn't hold up that well because other Asian kids with less going for them got into all these places.

Yes - but those Asian admits likely were either admitted before Zhang was denied, or those applicants offered something different than what Zhang was offering - it is not always because the application had a deficit. Not every stellar Asian (or white) applicant can be admitted, especially if they are male. Every week, there is a post about this very topic on DCUM.

Please, if he was a URM, he would have gotten into every one of those schools. His application is so ridiculous that it may be worth his time to sue and let those schools explain why he is less qualified for admission than their URM admits

Should he sue to let them explain why all the less qualified Asian American or White kids got in?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Uh, your ignorance is on display. I’m assuming that the poster meant “American Born Chinese.”

That would still be considered Chinese, for application purposes. Now your ignorance is on display.

He is not Chinese, he is American. Just like your kid is not German, or Irish, or English...

Are you implying colleges should be race-blind? That’s racist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hold up. We all know many students accepted to CS at these colleges (not all of them, but many of them) with similar academic stats and without the addition of his coding and business accomolishments. There is something else going on here.

Honestly sounds like he doesn’t need college at all and I bet that was a factor.

Why admit the guy who is definitely going to drop out year two to run his unicorn startup when you can give the seat and financial aid to someone who actually needs the education?

I’m sure the professors would be thrilled to have him in class as well when he already knows more than them and has superior accomplishments.

It’s a rational admissions decision, candidate is overqualified.

Grades and test scores are irrelevant, candidate is performing as a superior working professional in the field already; put him in the file for faculty hire instead.

Because those drop outs bring the university prestige and often end up donating large amounts of money. If I ran an admissions office, I'd take 100 of those kids before I took any kid who needed massive aid and planed to major in classics or gender studies

I'm guessing this kid wrote something just like that - denigrating the classics and/or gender studies in their Common App essay(s). And then had the applications tossed. Nothing else really explains the outcome except some kind of egregious self-inflicted injury. The "Asian" argument doesn't hold up that well because other Asian kids with less going for them got into all these places.

Yes - but those Asian admits likely were either admitted before Zhang was denied, or those applicants offered something different than what Zhang was offering - it is not always because the application had a deficit. Not every stellar Asian (or white) applicant can be admitted, especially if they are male. Every week, there is a post about this very topic on DCUM.

Please, if he was a URM, he would have gotten into every one of those schools. His application is so ridiculous that it may be worth his time to sue and let those schools explain why he is less qualified for admission than their URM admits

Should he sue to let them explain why all the less qualified Asian American or White kids got in?

Didn’t we already have that case in front of the Supreme Court?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:IDK, maybe he didn't take his apps seriously.

That seems relative.

It could be that his essay was lackluster. Maybe his recs were not good?

IMO, college admissions does appear to be a crapshoot.

My DC is a CS major at UMD and knows someone with amazing stats and background, and they also got rejected to those schools, as did DC, and DC doesn't have that kind of high caliber background like this student or OP's example though their stats are higher than OP's example. So DC now doesn't feel as bad for being rejected at those schools knowing how such high stats with great background students also got rejected to those schools.

Oh well, that just means UMD will get stronger and stronger. Go Terps!

Go Terps!

[Anonymous]

Please, if he was a URM, he would have gotten into every one of those schools. His application is so ridiculous that it may be worth his time to sue and let those schools explain why he is less qualified for admission than their URM admits

Why are people discussing race since MIT is overwhelmingly Asian and the UC schools don't even consider race. Agree with other posters that something else was going on, but also that he doesn't need college and will be fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Uh, your ignorance is on display. I’m assuming that the poster meant “American Born Chinese.”

That would still be considered Chinese, for application purposes. Now your ignorance is on display.

He is not Chinese, he is American. Just like your kid is not German, or Irish, or English...

Are you implying colleges should be race-blind? That’s racist.

No need to be knee jerking and calling people names. Also, do you read? Take your issue to the supreme court.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-strikes-down-affirmative-action-programs-in-college-admissions/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Uh, your ignorance is on display. I’m assuming that the poster meant “American Born Chinese.”

That would still be considered Chinese, for application purposes. Now your ignorance is on display.

He is not Chinese, he is American. Just like your kid is not German, or Irish, or English...

It’s like you don’t understand how college admissions work at all.

I know how it works. It pits middle class against one another and let the rich legacy kids slide in. It is class, not race.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Stanley Zhong graduated from high school in June 2023. Starting in 2020, he built an e-signing startup (details below) that is featured in an Amazon Web Services case study. That led to multiple companies interviewing him for full-time jobs despite the slow IT job market. Shortly after he turned 18, Google hired him as an L4 software engineer, a position typically offered to candidates with multiple years of professional experience as well as a college degree.

In contrast, his college application results were underwhelming. He applied to the Computer Science programs. All but two colleges (listed below) rejected his application.

MIT
CMU
Stanford
UC Berkeley
UC LA
UC San Diego
UC Santa Barbara
UC Davis
California Polytechnic State University
Cornell University
Univ of Illinois
Univ of Michigan
Georgia Tech
Cal Tech
Univ of Wisconsin
Univ of Washington

Only Univ of Texas and Univ of Maryland accepted his application.

Here are some highlights of his application.

Advanced to the Google Code Jam Coding Contest semi-final.

Led his team to the 2nd place in MIT Battlecode''s global high school division (1st place in the US). Invited to MIT with expenses paid.

Created an e-signing startup (RabbitSign.com) that has grown to tens of thousands of users organically.

An Amazon Web Services Well-Architected Review concluded that it "is one of the most efficient and secure accounts" they have reviewed.

Amazon Web Services is publishing a case study featuring RabbitSign for its exemplary use of AWS Serverless and compliance services.

Designed, implemented and operated the web frontend, RESTful APIs, workflow orchestration, metrics and alerting, horizontal scaling, CDN, rate limiting, security hardening (including intrusion detection and DDoS protection), compliance monitoring, internationalization, and disaster recovery.

Passed multi-week whitebox pentest with no major security issues discovered.

Wrote comprehensive unit tests, continuous API Postman tests, and end-to-end Selenium tests.

Negotiated a 90% discount (worth $40K+) for compliance audits. After working with the auditors over several quarters, RabbitSign is now the world''s only provider of unlimited free SOC 2-, ISO 27001- and HIPAA-compliant e-signing.

Co-founded a non-profit that brings free coding lessons to kids in underserved communities. He recruited and built a volunteer team made of 20+ industry professionals, Stanford postdoc and high schoolers. Over 2 years, the team taught 500+ kids in California, Washington and Texas.

National Merit Scholarship finalist

SAT: 1590

GPA (UW/W): 3.97/4.42

I absolutely believe this. Is he not Asian? If you are an Asian male or a white male, you are SOL at the top colleges, because colleges are not supposed to accept "too many" of those. If the applicant is a female that is not 100% Asian or 100% white, even if their GPA and test scores were not that strong, they would have been accepted into a STEM program at *all* of those schools. Sad but true.

Lol yes that makes sense! There are too many there so none get in?

No, there are too many qualified applicants from one community, so they look for reasons to reject. Too few qualified applicants from another community, so they'll look for reasons to admit.

This kids apps were probably sloppy, and if he doesn't communicate his accomplishments well, no one is going to dig for a reason to admit an Asian male.

Agree with the bolded. He could have had a perfect application, having zero faults or criticism, but because he is Asian male (and also, if he would have been a white male), there are only so many slots for them in the STEM programs. If the college already had those slots filled, he is not getting admitted, like it or not. That is why people call the current application climate a "lottery", for good reason.

He is a CA resident that applied to six state school, that are by the way race blind admissions, and wasn’t accepted at any. Places like UC San Diego, which is very science/tech heavy, has 37% Asian student population.

There was likely something else. I know for example at a different state university with over a 75% acceptance rate they were very clear you needed to have English 12 and maybe one other grade 12 course or something like that but it was said in such a way that it sounded like this had been an issue in the past for kids that were advanced and finished up all their credits early not that kids were underachievers. UMD has that must apply by Nov 1 EA where they take 90% of the class …so easily someone coming in to apply at RD could have great stats and get rejected and if you didn’t know the full story you could say it’s because they are x versus it being because they didn’t apply EA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:IDK, maybe he didn't take his apps seriously.

That seems relative.

It could be that his essay was lackluster. Maybe his recs were not good?

IMO, college admissions does appear to be a crapshoot.

My DC is a CS major at UMD and knows someone with amazing stats and background, and they also got rejected to those schools, as did DC, and DC doesn't have that kind of high caliber background like this student or OP's example though their stats are higher than OP's example. So DC now doesn't feel as bad for being rejected at those schools knowing how such high stats with great background students also got rejected to those schools.

Oh well, that just means UMD will get stronger and stronger. Go Terps!

Go Terps!

UMD is great!