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.