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

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

Anonymous wrote:The system is broken.

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

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.

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

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

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?

Because he already has enough and doesn't need more. He already has everything a college could give him.

Anonymous wrote:Something about this story doesn't add up. I can't believe all those California state schools rejected a California resident with those stats. Either those really aren't his stats, or he can't write an essay, or his teachers hate him, but there's something else going on.

Anonymous wrote:Haha Hacker News banned us
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37783167

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.

Anonymous wrote:Colleges - esp the mainstream ones he applied mostly for (albeit tops) - are looking at formulas. There's a zillion candidates and they look at the TOP candidates. His GPA was not all that. He had a lot of awards but you don't know how his recs/interviews/essays went. The competition is epic at a lot of these colleges. Everyone is smart and accomplished with high GPA/test scores. Then you have to look at nationality/legacy/location of applications.

When I do campus recruiting of MBAs, EVERY ONE of them is tops. You have no idea how competitive it really is. It's about a formula and a popularity contest that will get you in. It's not how real life works which is why Stanley is going to be successful sans college