Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This kid looks perfect. Why did so many other less perfect Asian applicants get accepted over him??? Something is missing from this story

College admission is a crap shot, just like private high school admission here. DC's friends were all over the place unless they had powerful families.

[Anonymous]

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).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:College admission is stupid.

This kid was on the front page of Washington Post with the secretary of defense in 2016, and he did not get into CMU or his top choices. Now he is an L6 at Google.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cyber/teen-hacks-pentagon-websites-gets-thanked-for-finding-bugs-idUSKCN0Z32IU

+1

Yield protection, at a whole new level, literally!

OP, wondering why you think this kid needs college? Any college?

He is now an L6 ($500k-$600k). If I understand OP correctly, he started as an L4, whic h would be $227k-$327k. Is this why all the parents who know their kids can not make it as a doctor or a lawyer want them to be CS? They think all those kids are going to FAANG? Isn't that as much of a lottery as college admissions, if not, more?

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This kid looks perfect. Why did so many other less perfect Asian applicants get accepted over him??? Something is missing from this story

College admission is a crap shot, just like private high school admission here. DC's friends were all over the place unless they had powerful families.

+1

Or were not white or Asian (or male).

[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

All this tell me is that all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over admissions to so-called elite colleges is much ado about very little. A kid like this can excel at any college they go to. No career doors are closed to them by not going to any of the colleges they were rejected from.

[Anonymous]

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

All this tell me is that all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over admissions to so-called elite colleges is much ado about very little. A kid like this can excel at any college they go to. No career doors are closed to them by not going to any of the colleges they were rejected from.

That is essentially what the colleges that rejected him are saying - he did not "need" their school, unlike the next applicant.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

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.

Exactly - and that is a top U.S. high school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:College admission is stupid.

This kid was on the front page of Washington Post with the secretary of defense in 2016, and he did not get into CMU or his top choices. Now he is an L6 at Google.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cyber/teen-hacks-pentagon-websites-gets-thanked-for-finding-bugs-idUSKCN0Z32IU

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ddworken/ says L5

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/802828/carter-announces-hack-the-pentagon-program-results/

says 250 people found bugs in the junk government website, and Dworken didn't find any bugs first -- other people had already found the same bugs.

He's brilliant, but a lot of other people are also brilliant. Computers is an extremely popular and competitive field. And despite DCUM, NEU is a great school!

[Anonymous]

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).

Of course it is not frequent, or it would not make the news. I would not say rare though. And of course there is a reason. The colleges will make their class perfect with or without your perfect student.

For the student, it is a crap shot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:College admission is stupid.

This kid was on the front page of Washington Post with the secretary of defense in 2016, and he did not get into CMU or his top choices. Now he is an L6 at Google.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cyber/teen-hacks-pentagon-websites-gets-thanked-for-finding-bugs-idUSKCN0Z32IU

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ddworken/ says L5

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/802828/carter-announces-hack-the-pentagon-program-results/

says 250 people found bugs in the junk government website, and Dworken didn't find any bugs first -- other people had already found the same bugs.

He's brilliant, but a lot of other people are also brilliant. Computers is an extremely popular and competitive field. And despite DCUM, NEU is a great school!

He was better than a lot of the kids got into many of the colleges rejected him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:College admission is stupid.

This kid was on the front page of Washington Post with the secretary of defense in 2016, and he did not get into CMU or his top choices. Now he is an L6 at Google.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cyber/teen-hacks-pentagon-websites-gets-thanked-for-finding-bugs-idUSKCN0Z32IU

+1

Yield protection, at a whole new level, literally!

OP, wondering why you think this kid needs college? Any college?

He is now an L6 ($500k-$600k). If I understand OP correctly, he started as an L4, whic h would be $227k-$327k. Is this why all the parents who know their kids can not make it as a doctor or a lawyer want them to be CS? They think all those kids are going to FAANG? Isn't that as much of a lottery as college admissions, if not, more?

Not a lottery, because they only care about the skills they interview for, not building an orchestra or keeping the tenured History professor busy.

[Anonymous]

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

All this tell me is that all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over admissions to so-called elite colleges is much ado about very little. A kid like this can excel at any college they go to. No career doors are closed to them by not going to any of the colleges they were rejected from.

True, all these kids ended up being happy and doing great at the end. However who need this kind of stress at 18?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:College admission is stupid.

This kid was on the front page of Washington Post with the secretary of defense in 2016, and he did not get into CMU or his top choices. Now he is an L6 at Google.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-cyber/teen-hacks-pentagon-websites-gets-thanked-for-finding-bugs-idUSKCN0Z32IU

+1

Yield protection, at a whole new level, literally!

OP, wondering why you think this kid needs college? Any college?

He is now an L6 ($500k-$600k). If I understand OP correctly, he started as an L4, whic h would be $227k-$327k. Is this why all the parents who know their kids can not make it as a doctor or a lawyer want them to be CS? They think all those kids are going to FAANG? Isn't that as much of a lottery as college admissions, if not, more?

Not a lottery, because they only care about the skills they interview for, not building an orchestra or keeping the tenured History professor busy.

That tenured History professor probably has a bestselling book or Documentary on Netflix. Way more famous than anyone is the CS DEPT