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.

You don't think he could learn anything from research professors at Berkley or CalTech or MIT?

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.

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

Anonymous wrote:IDK, maybe he didn't take his apps seriously.

Anonymous wrote:Wow. Looking at where his classmates got in. No wonder. That’s who he was competing against.

Anonymous wrote:

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

are you kidding? A lot of kids who get in are one dimensional in the sense that they are super accomplished in that one area.

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.

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.

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: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.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m not saying that this kid shouldn’t have gotten into these schools, but if you Google him you’ll see he’s from Palo Alto and I would be shocked if at least one of his parents wasn’t already in the tech industry. He just randomly thought of an e-signing service? For fun? The website is VERY professional. I have no doubt the kid is a good coder if he got that far in the Google code jam. But I also highly doubt that’s all in some vacuum.
https://www.rabbitsign.com/

This is where kids in his high school went to school.
https://gunn.pausd.org/campus-life/college-career-center/college-matriculation-summary

But I admit that even if he did have help, he did 1000 times more than my kid in high school!

Yeah. If 18 people got into UC Berkeley and one got into MIT and it wasn’t him, something is up with his apps or teacher recs.

If he is truly as incredible as you want him to be, the counselor letter would say that. This is a school where the top schools you mention take kids from his school. The counselors know the reps.

Anonymous wrote:I’m not saying that this kid shouldn’t have gotten into these schools, but if you Google him you’ll see he’s from Palo Alto and I would be shocked if at least one of his parents wasn’t already in the tech industry. He just randomly thought of an e-signing service? For fun? The website is VERY professional. I have no doubt the kid is a good coder if he got that far in the Google code jam. But I also highly doubt that’s all in some vacuum.
https://www.rabbitsign.com/

This is where kids in his high school went to school.
https://gunn.pausd.org/campus-life/college-career-center/college-matriculation-summary

But I admit that even if he did have help, he did 1000 times more than my kid in high school!

Anonymous wrote:Wow. Looking at where his classmates got in. No wonder. That’s who he was competing against.

Anonymous wrote:

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

I absolutely believe this. Is he not Asian? If you are an Asian male or a white male, you are SOL at the top colleges, because colleges are not supposed to accept "too many" of those. If the applicant is a female that is not 100% Asian or 100% white, even if their GPA and test scores were not that strong, they would have been accepted into a STEM program at *all* of those schools. Sad but true.

Lol yes that makes sense! There are too many there so none get in?

No, there are too many qualified applicants from one community, so they look for reasons to reject. Too few qualified applicants from another community, so they'll look for reasons to admit.

This kids apps were probably sloppy, and if he doesn't communicate his accomplishments well, no one is going to dig for a reason to admit an Asian male.