Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

Sad to see Asians attacking Asians like this.

AI can do math and read literature and history books too.

And since Stanley has a 4.4 GPA, that means he did study advanced literature and history.

He did all that and also starred a successful busines whe most teens dropped out of school for a year to play Minecraft. Have you started a successful business?

The only consolation here is that Stanley is too good for college. Hell probably be engineering director in 5-10 years if he stays at Google, making Big Law money and having a lot more fun.

Only on DCUM would somebody use the term “Big Law” money when talking about Tech.

You do realize that kids looking to make it in Techntalk in multiplies of 100x “Big Law” money.

Let’s not sell this kid short!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

Sad to see Asians attacking Asians like this.

AI can do math and read literature and history books too.

And since Stanley has a 4.4 GPA, that means he did study advanced literature and history.

He did all that and also starred a successful busines whe most teens dropped out of school for a year to play Minecraft. Have you started a successful business?

The only consolation here is that Stanley is too good for college. Hell probably be engineering director in 5-10 years if he stays at Google, making Big Law money and having a lot more fun.

Only on DCUM would somebody use the term “Big Law” money when talking about Tech.

You do realize that kids looking to make it in Techntalk in multiplies of 100x “Big Law” money.

Let’s not sell this kid short!

Yes, my DC is a quant and makes about 470K after 4 years with only BS (although from the best CS program in the country) so saved 3 years and $250K. Likely to make $700 to $1.5M in another 4 to 5 years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

They are officially, but there was some analysis done last few cycles and what’s happening is that UC schools are targeting heavily minority schools vs schools in more affluent areas that are primarily white and asian. This can be done without “considering” race in the application. And now that they’ve eliminated tests completely, it gives them more leeway. The California schools are doing what many schools said they would do after AA was struck down; they’re emphasizing first generation, and geographic diversity to get the proportion of URM students they want. Some of the changes were really striking. At many top performing schools the percentage of kids accepted to the top UC schools went from ~40% to ~15%. Conversely the rate at lower performing schools had the opposite change.

No, UC is a state school system that wants to get a proportion of students from across California.

I'm the PP, and that's certainly a reasonable take on what they're doing. That won't get the most academically qualified kids at the schools, but it's certainly fits with the mission of educating all of the states kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

They are officially, but there was some analysis done last few cycles and what’s happening is that UC schools are targeting heavily minority schools vs schools in more affluent areas that are primarily white and asian. This can be done without “considering” race in the application. And now that they’ve eliminated tests completely, it gives them more leeway. The California schools are doing what many schools said they would do after AA was struck down; they’re emphasizing first generation, and geographic diversity to get the proportion of URM students they want. Some of the changes were really striking. At many top performing schools the percentage of kids accepted to the top UC schools went from ~40% to ~15%. Conversely the rate at lower performing schools had the opposite change.

No, UC is a state school system that wants to get a proportion of students from across California.

I'm the PP, and that's certainly a reasonable take on what they're doing. That won't get the most academically qualified kids at the schools, but it's certainly fits with the mission of educating all of the states kids.

Isn't that the mission of all state schools? To educate everybody in the state.

[Anonymous]

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

Wow OP - it is unbelievable that so many colleges rejected him with all his academic talents, computer brilliance and entrepreneurship.

I hope he chose U Md - he would be a great asset for our state’s flagship.

Hopefully he will have his pick of grad schools if chooses to go that route.

Also I hope this experience is a source of comfort to other students who have experienced so many college rejections despite being excellent students .

He pciked UT but is taking gap year at the moment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxvZGnRoY3E

Oh that is our loss. He sounds remarkable. If he changes his mind, many of us in and will welcome him.

He is not only academically gifted but has an outstanding commitment to serving greater public goods. It is truly amazing that he developed free auditing software that will help small businesses and non profits to keep financial records straight.


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.


It is incredible that he helped bring his much needed skill sets to disadvantaged youth.

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.


Stanley will likely succeed in whatever he does due to a combination of having both brains and heart - but IMO it was a big fail for so many top universities to reject such a bright and accomplished young person.

[Anonymous]

It tells something wrong as 16 out of 18 colleges reject his application. With higher education, Stanley can be trained more valuable for his skill set to serve the nation. If this rejection case happens to many talented students, it will be the loss of the nation.

[Anonymous]

Honestly, I hope there's more of this. We've fallen into this notion that college is strictly preferred to any other path. Hopefully, some of these companies will pay for talent right out of the gate, which will be the only way colleges take a hard look at what they can do to attract top students to college over the workforce.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

They are officially, but there was some analysis done last few cycles and what’s happening is that UC schools are targeting heavily minority schools vs schools in more affluent areas that are primarily white and asian. This can be done without “considering” race in the application. And now that they’ve eliminated tests completely, it gives them more leeway. The California schools are doing what many schools said they would do after AA was struck down; they’re emphasizing first generation, and geographic diversity to get the proportion of URM students they want. Some of the changes were really striking. At many top performing schools the percentage of kids accepted to the top UC schools went from ~40% to ~15%. Conversely the rate at lower performing schools had the opposite change.

No, UC is a state school system that wants to get a proportion of students from across California.

I'm the PP, and that's certainly a reasonable take on what they're doing. That won't get the most academically qualified kids at the schools, but it's certainly fits with the mission of educating all of the states kids.

You are right. They won't get all of the best students. But that isn't their mission. Their mission is to service the entire state. If they can take a few good kids from a bad district and make them better then it is a win-win for everybody.

[Anonymous]

What’s wrong with UC? I truly can’t see why their public universities don’t want their best high schoolers. Busit too many good students. Maybe they secretly practice yield protection, but it feels so wrong.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What’s wrong with UC? I truly can’t see why their public universities don’t want their best high schoolers. Busit too many good students. Maybe they secretly practice yield protection, but it feels so wrong.

It's not just UCs. It's the whole college admission.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

and your son could have had bad essays and LORs. You can rule it out because he's your son but that's not reality.

"bad" essays are subjective, as are LOR.

[Anonymous]

When we think about the technology competition with other countries such as China, we need talented people on top of our college education. If we keep blocking many talented young people from it, our competition edge will be drawn behind others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just watched the ABC news clip where father and son were interviewed. The kid and father seemed nice. No crazy red flags. i agree with there suggestion that kids can get feedbacy about why they were rejected.

DH and I were just talking about this. Colleges will never do that because then it makes admissions less opaque and open to lawsuits.

Or, they could use the "not a cultural fit" excuse that hiring managers use to discriminate.

This is what happens when you use subjective criteria.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:When we think about the technology competition with other countries such as China, we need talented people on top of our college education. If we keep blocking many talented young people from it, our competition edge will be drawn behind others.

The only American universities that use "national" standards are the service academies. Private schools are businesses and state schools are responsible for their local populations. Is it a big? Is it a feature? No good answer there...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It tells something wrong as 16 out of 18 colleges reject his application. With higher education, Stanley can be trained more valuable for his skill set to serve the nation. If this rejection case happens to many talented students, it will be the loss of the nation.

Stanley is already trained.