Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

I love when people assume that a kid like this must have made some mistake on their application instead of acknowledging the shit show that college admissions are today.

[Anonymous]

ABC -- American Born Chinese

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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?

ABC.

Are you trying to be funny?

[Anonymous]

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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?

Literally thousands[b] of less qualified AA and White kids got in over him. [b]And a few dozen URM kids also. Why not sue and figure out what happened?

[Anonymous]

Cool story.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:He lives in Palo Alto. Half the people in his neighborhood/school have 1 or 2 programmer parents at big companies or startups, including founders with VC investment funding.

https://www.bizapedia.com/ca/rabbitsign-inc.html

His father is a veteran of Amazon and Google and a past VC-funded startup founder.

It's interesting that successful startup founders end up as regular employees at BigCos.

Unless he wants to go get a PhD, which he probably doesn't, he has no interest in college and colleges don't need him.

Ding! Ding! I wondered this. The website is way too well done, and my husband (has worked at several FAANG companies and started his own tech business before that) asked who was paying to support all those free sign ups).

My kid is not that motivated (or we have not motivated her enough) but it would not have been very difficult for my husband to have helped her set up some kind of tech company and make it look like a big deal. I’m not saying that’s why this could wouldn’t get admitted. His coding was obviously extremely strong for his age. But the business stuff borders on the Varsity Blues kinds of scandals where you have to ask how much credit to give a kid whose father is in the BUSINESS of starting and funding tech companies.

[Anonymous]

Hired by Google does not mean they should get into MIT lol. Google is a massive company with hundreds of thousands of employees. MIT has 4,000 undergrads.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hired by Google does not mean they should get into MIT lol. Google is a massive company with hundreds of thousands of employees. MIT has 4,000 undergrads.

It is certainly impressive to get hired by Google at 18, although it’s not as hard to be hired by Google as it used to be. Sophomores in college get hired as paid interns by Google, Amazon, etc…and if they do well are hired after college.

[Anonymous]

How do we know that it's a true story? I see his profile on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanley-zhong-277440186/

It doesn't say that he is employed by Google.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:College admissions are not a crap shoot. Yes plenty of times it is hard to understand why one kid was accepted and another was not, and with any college with an under 10% admit rate there will be many qualified students who don’t get in, but if you talk to admissions reps, they have reasons. It is rare to see a student with stats like this kid get rejected from almost every college given the range of colleges he applied to (e.g., not all ivies).

At a certain point, when top applicants are being turned away, it is most certainly a crap shoot. If you do not know this, you have not been involved in the college admission process recently. You do realize there are only so many seats at the top schools.

I have a kid who applied to college last year and the other 2 years before him. So I am familiar with the current landscape. Do I think my own kids should have gotten into some colleges that they didn’t? Of course. But I can say that most kids in their grades wound up at the type of college I would have predicted for them. And I also know that wven for kids whose results surprised me, I didn’t know everything that went into their applications like all of their extracurriculars, etc.

Getting back to the point, this kid did not get into Cal Poly and UC Davis among many other colleges that it seems like he should have reading the article. He actually applied to a range of schools. So I believe there is something or things else that we don’t know about his apps.

[Anonymous]

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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?

Exactly. Except......

[Anonymous]

Who puts this kid and his stats all over the internet for random people to gossip? I feel bad for him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:He lives in Palo Alto. Half the people in his neighborhood/school have 1 or 2 programmer parents at big companies or startups, including founders with VC investment funding.

https://www.bizapedia.com/ca/rabbitsign-inc.html

His father is a veteran of Amazon and Google and a past VC-funded startup founder.

It's interesting that successful startup founders end up as regular employees at BigCos.

Unless he wants to go get a PhD, which he probably doesn't, he has no interest in college and colleges don't need him.

Ding! Ding! I wondered this. The website is way too well done, and my husband (has worked at several FAANG companies and started his own tech business before that) asked who was paying to support all those free sign ups).

My kid is not that motivated (or we have not motivated her enough) but it would not have been very difficult for my husband to have helped her set up some kind of tech company and make it look like a big deal. I’m not saying that’s why this could wouldn’t get admitted. His coding was obviously extremely strong for his age. But the business stuff borders on the Varsity Blues kinds of scandals where you have to ask how much credit to give a kid whose father is in the BUSINESS of starting and funding tech companies.

Bit of a weird take. His immigrant father started a tech company. Who helped his father do that?

Obviously his father helped, and that's a privilege, but it's not FAKE.

[Anonymous]

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

Essays were horrendous (or alarming to the readers), the applicant consistently neglected to sufficiently complete the applications correctly, or they are on a “Do Not Fly” list somewhere. The probability that someone with that CV was NOT admitted to 14 of those 16 schools is essentially undetectable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How do we know that it's a true story? I see his profile on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanley-zhong-277440186/

It doesn't say that he is employed by Google.

I wonder if the grapevine mixed up the kid and his father, who does work at Google.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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?

Literally thousands[b] of less qualified AA and White kids got in over him. [b]And a few dozen URM kids also. Why not sue and figure out what happened?

because it's like trying to sue for age discrimination when the hiring manager used the words "not a cultural fit".

My DH, 59, just went through that with HR. How do you prove a subjective measurement is discrimination?