Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gunn has an average SAT of nearly 1500.

This is what happens when students are compared to their classmates. In a typical American high school Zhang would be SO far above everyone else. But at Gunn he doesn't stand out.

I think that needs to be discussed. 1590 is incredible no matter where it comes from. Why give brownie points to kids that come from worse high schools?

But is that the reason he was rejected by mid- lower-tier UCs? Also His GPA is at least 9% at his high school

but UCs take the top 6 or 7%. Again, he should've gone to a lower performing school to really stand out academically.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Doesn’t seem well rounded. Very one dimensional. All he does is computers.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:He applied to too many. That's my theory.

I've noticed when these kids post their accepted/denied/deferred/waitlisted videos on social media each spring, it's always the kids with amazing stats and ECs that applied to like 15-20 schools that get sh!tty results.

No one needs to apply to 25 schools. Applying to 25 schools tells me that you don't care where you go to school, you just want to get accepted to college, preferably a T20-25. Applying to all Ivys tells me that you don't care which Ivy you go to, you just want to go to an Ivy.

Kids are no longer selective. They don't show interest in one school and they don't make that interest known like they used to.

DS has lower stats than Stanley Zhong but expressed his interest from the start in attending Cal Poly. He was accepted and is in his second year there. DS only applied to 6 schools and was accepted at all: Cal Poly, U Mich, UCSD, VT, Duke, and UNC.

Why I cannot just want to go to an Ivy.
Don't be a hypocrite.

[Anonymous]

Coding is just a technical skill that many people can acquired. Back to the 90s, so many people took a class and become a programmer. Coding skill is so common that it just like a technician in a special field. On the top of the pyramid are those smart people who innovate big ideas and great architecture. There is not evident this kid is extremely smart in that. This kid started coding from very early age. Bill Gate did coding at very age. That is fine. It's because a that time, not many people knows how to code. But now, millions of people knows how to code. even AI is can code too. Doing things millions can do at early age just wasting time. He shouldn't spend his childhood doing coding - a low level jobs like a technician. He should be learning Math, exploring literature and histories. Good colleges are looking people who are special, who are smarter than any others, but not kids who start doing easy thing early. This case is not a race discrimination, and don't get it wrong.

[Anonymous]

So many lame excuses for plain and simple racism on this thread. Sad!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So many lame excuses for plain and simple racism on this thread. Sad!

I thought California universities were race blind?

He got (almost) shut out because there were many other better-qualified kids from his HS.

[Anonymous]

The system is broken.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The system is broken.

Nice that you can reach this conclusion without actually having seen his application.

[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

Although possessing of high academic credentials, this applicant was adjudged to have 'poor' personality traits such as lacking in empathy, leadership potential, honesty and integrity and thus received the lowest possible score (just like most high scoring Asian students lacking legacy/connections) and thus rejected from the freshmen class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is he fun to hang out with? Colleges care about stuff like that as they are trying to build a community

Oh my God. It's college, not a fraternity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many lame excuses for plain and simple racism on this thread. Sad!

100%

If this was a black or Hispanic kid that had these stats and got shut out, the tune would most certainly be different.

And the saddest part is that most of these posts are from people that consider themselves anti-racist.

I agree that there is a lot of racism on this thread. We are all speculating and hopefully the parents and student gets an answer on what happened.

Maybe the student was just unlucky, but jumping to the conclusion that this happened because he is Asian is not supported by the evidence that is available to us via the article. Most of the schools the student applied to do not take race into consideration and many admit students primarily on stats. Looking at the list, besides targeting schools with good computer science programs, it seems like the student also picked schools where being Asian shouldn’t penalize him based on the school demographics, and prior admissions practices.

We don’t know what his essay was like, or if his teachers wrote weak recommendation letters. However, I doubt his essay or rec letters were terrible given that he got into Texas and Maryland. Also, CalPoly doesn’t even have essays or rec letters. University of Washington also doesn’t have recommendation letters.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many lame excuses for plain and simple racism on this thread. Sad!

100%

If this was a black or Hispanic kid that had these stats and got shut out, the tune would most certainly be different.

And the saddest part is that most of these posts are from people that consider themselves anti-racist.

I agree that there is a lot of racism on this thread. We are all speculating and hopefully the parents and student gets an answer on what happened.

Maybe the student was just unlucky, but jumping to the conclusion that this happened because he is Asian is not supported by the evidence that is available to us via the article. Most of the schools the student applied to do not take race into consideration and many admit students primarily on stats. Looking at the list, besides targeting schools with good computer science programs, it seems like the student also picked schools where being Asian shouldn’t penalize him based on the school demographics, and prior admissions practices.

We don’t know what his essay was like, or if his teachers wrote weak recommendation letters. However, I doubt his essay or rec letters were terrible given that he got into Texas and Maryland. Also, CalPoly doesn’t even have essays or rec letters. University of Washington also doesn’t have recommendation letters.

This happens more often than not and should not be explained by the usual excuses such as bad essays, bad LoR etc. It is racism pure and simple.

My DC graduated in the top 1% of TJ and was rejected by 7 out of 8 schools applied to with 4.0/4.6+ GPA and 1600 SAT and ton of awards, Chem Olympiad, various ECs, writing awards, leadership positions, advanced orchestra, National Merit Scholar, volunteer awards etc. etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many lame excuses for plain and simple racism on this thread. Sad!

100%

If this was a black or Hispanic kid that had these stats and got shut out, the tune would most certainly be different.

And the saddest part is that most of these posts are from people that consider themselves anti-racist.

I agree that there is a lot of racism on this thread. We are all speculating and hopefully the parents and student gets an answer on what happened.

Maybe the student was just unlucky, but jumping to the conclusion that this happened because he is Asian is not supported by the evidence that is available to us via the article. Most of the schools the student applied to do not take race into consideration and many admit students primarily on stats. Looking at the list, besides targeting schools with good computer science programs, it seems like the student also picked schools where being Asian shouldn’t penalize him based on the school demographics, and prior admissions practices.

We don’t know what his essay was like, or if his teachers wrote weak recommendation letters. However, I doubt his essay or rec letters were terrible given that he got into Texas and Maryland. Also, CalPoly doesn’t even have essays or rec letters. University of Washington also doesn’t have recommendation letters.

This happens more often than not and should not be explained by the usual excuses such as bad essays, bad LoR etc. It is racism pure and simple.

My DC graduated in the top 1% of TJ and was rejected by 7 out of 8 schools applied to with 4.0/4.6+ GPA and 1600 SAT and ton of awards, Chem Olympiad, various ECs, writing awards, leadership positions, advanced orchestra, National Merit Scholar, volunteer awards etc. etc.

Nothing pure and simple about UC school admissions

[Anonymous]

Entry to ivy League stem schools is broken. Too much focus on things volunteering, gpa and not enough focus on stem pre college. For example our friends kid got into Stanford and MIT because he has straight A's and AP classes and good sats but never coded and is learning how to sophomore year. Where as another friend's kid focused all his time ages 9-17 building 20 or so programs and major projects full stack and cloud based programs where he made 50k but didn't have straight A's and AP classes except computer courses so didn't get into any ivy League stem schools. At the end of the day the ivy League kid will be at least 10 years behind after graduation

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So many lame excuses for plain and simple racism on this thread. Sad!

100%

If this was a black or Hispanic kid that had these stats and got shut out, the tune would most certainly be different.

And the saddest part is that most of these posts are from people that consider themselves anti-racist.

I agree that there is a lot of racism on this thread. We are all speculating and hopefully the parents and student gets an answer on what happened.

Maybe the student was just unlucky, but jumping to the conclusion that this happened because he is Asian is not supported by the evidence that is available to us via the article. Most of the schools the student applied to do not take race into consideration and many admit students primarily on stats. Looking at the list, besides targeting schools with good computer science programs, it seems like the student also picked schools where being Asian shouldn’t penalize him based on the school demographics, and prior admissions practices.

We don’t know what his essay was like, or if his teachers wrote weak recommendation letters. However, I doubt his essay or rec letters were terrible given that he got into Texas and Maryland. Also, CalPoly doesn’t even have essays or rec letters. University of Washington also doesn’t have recommendation letters.

This happens more often than not and should not be explained by the usual excuses such as bad essays, bad LoR etc. It is racism pure and simple.

My DC graduated in the top 1% of TJ and was rejected by 7 out of 8 schools applied to with 4.0/4.6+ GPA and 1600 SAT and ton of awards, Chem Olympiad, various ECs, writing awards, leadership positions, advanced orchestra, National Merit Scholar, volunteer awards etc. etc.

Why did those same schools admit less qualified Asian applicants? Why choose them over him?