Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges
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Anonymous
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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 |
Anonymous
| It’s all one big crapshoot. |
Anonymous
| IDK, maybe he didn't take his apps seriously. |
Anonymous
| So, he didn't need the schools that rejected him to be successful. He is doing fantastically well. |
Anonymous
| Do you have any idea what teacher recommendations said? |
Anonymous
| maybe they thought he would drop out. |
Anonymous
| He got into two great schools. Good for him! |
Anonymous
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! |
Anonymous
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. |
Anonymous
| He is Asian. |
Anonymous
| He's way better off. |
Anonymous
| 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. |
Anonymous
Or essays? |
Anonymous
| I told you Maryland sucks. Lol. |
Anonymous
| nah.. colleges know Stanley Zhong doesn't need college anymore. |