Stanley Zhong, 18, gets turned down by 14 universities, lands job at Google as a Software Engineer.
An 18-year-old named Stanley Zhong has fought back after he got rejected by 14 universities after high school, and became a Software Engineer at Google.
Stanley graduated from Gunn High School with an overall grade point average of 3.96 and a SAT score of 1590. After he graduated he applied to 18 universities and colleges in the United States, and 14 of them rejected him.
As well as getting good grades, Stanley was also a finalist in several international computer coding competitions and started a free electronic signature company called RabbitSign. He said that while he was anticipating rejection from his first choice school, Stanford University, there were those who were more shocking.
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Nobody has ever said he or she was going to get into Stanford, Berkeley or MIT but I applied for a few state schools where I thought I had a better chance. I did not receive any response from any colleges. “You don’t receive reasons, you just get ‘you’re rejective,'” Zhong told CBS MoneyWatch.
For some of them, it was more or less expected. For a lot of them I felt frustrated in the sense of ‘What do you want from me?’ “I feel like as students we should know what we need to be doing to get into these colleges,” he added.
Stanley was admitted to four other schools including the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. Not wallowing in disappointment, Stanley said he decided to matriculate at the University of Texas at Austin and at the same time apply to Google for an opening as a software engineer.
“I so wanted to get a full-time job too and see what happened.” “I thought worst case I would get interview experience and know what the process was like and maybe I would get lucky,” he said.
Luckily, Stanley found a job as a software developer engineer for Google, which does not require a college degree. He is employed by the company as a full-time employee and is planning to return to school next year.
“I am very fortunate to have this opportunity and I’ll be holding on to it for at least one year from now. From there I will reason, ‘Is my work good and my contribution good?’ “If that’s the case, then I will stay until I don’t feel like I am or that I am really losing out on a lot by not going to college,” Stanley said.