Lessons from Teen Rejected by 16 Colleges, Hired By Google (0.67 % Chance)

A friend recently shared an ABC news story about Stanley Zhong, a student at Palo Alto’s Gunn High School who had a 3.97 unweighted GPA, a 1590 on his SATs and founded the company RabbitSign.

Zhong applied to 18 colleges and was rejected by 16 of them, including the usual suspects: Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Cornell University, and Caltech.

But surprisingly, he also got denied from UCSD, UCSB, UC Davis, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, University of Washington and University of Wisconsin.

Zhong was only accepted at University of Texas and University of Maryland.

And shortly after those rejections, Zhong got a full-time software engineering job offer at Google, which has a 0.67% hiring rate in 2023.

What can we learn about college admissions from this student’s experience? 

Denials Don’t Mean Candidates Aren’t Qualified

If you fit the average academic stats of those admitted, you are qualified to handle the workload at the school. There are many other institutional priorities like legacy, financial status, gender, geography, and college major that come in to play in admissions decisions.

An August 2023 study found that Asian Americans have a 28% lower chance of admission into college compared to white peers. If you’re South Asian, that gap is 49%. The gap may close a bit with the Supreme Court ruling striking of affirmative action, but I don’t expect a significant difference (more than that topic in a future blog post.)

Asian-American males in the Bay Area applying for STEM fields most likely face the lowest chances of getting into top colleges because… colleges want diversity.

I suspect the student got denied from his “safety” schools because those institutions figured he would not attend and wanted to protect their yield rate—colleges rankings evaluate the percent of accepted students who actually choose attend.

Takeaway: The best way to ensure admission is to apply to a wide variety of schools and also a large number of them. If you are in California and UC qualified, apply to every single UC and hopefully you will get into one.

You Don’t Need College to Earn a Living

Every day I read stories like the University of Hawaii at Manoa student who makes up to $38,000 a day selling stickers, or the 15-year old Eric Zhu who’s raised $1m for his second startup, which he runs from his high school bathroom stalls.

There is so much information online. You can literally learn anything for free.

Takeaway: Start learning about your passions, for free, online.

Apply for internships and jobs before you get to college.

Share you work (the Google recruiter found Zhong through code he shared on Github. Yes, Zhong’s father is a senior executive at Google, but the recruiter first contacted Zhong when he was age 13. (Zhong told the recruiter he was too young at that point.))

Consider building your own business.

Keep Trying

In my own career, sometimes I have been denied opportunities at certain companies and been offered jobs at much larger, prestigious and better paying ones.

The acceptance and hiring process can be opaque and illogical. Also, if you’re a minority or female, you will face discrimination in life.

The best strategy is keep trying and control what you can control.

Once you start landing opportunities, titles, awards, and other forms of recognition, add them to your LinkedIn profile and opportunities will start snowballing because you’ve built credibility.

Put yourself out there. Keep trying and iterating.

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The college application process is getting more competitive every year. That’s why I’ve recently enlarged the focus of my admissions coaching practice to include life skills. You can’t control whether someone will accept you, but you can build skills like an entrepreneurial mindset that will help you “succeed” no matter where you end up. 

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