For Palo Alto resident Stanley Zhong, life has been a bit of a whirlwind for the last few days. After receiving rejections from 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to for computer science programs, he pursued and landed a job as a software engineer at Google a few days ago and has been in the blinding media glare ever since.
“I’m going with the flow right now, taking my time to process this and slow it down a little. There’s been a lot of talking with friends, talking with family about how I’m feeling and what’s going on right now,” said the Gunn High School graduate over a Zoom call with this publication, sounding more mature than the average 18-year-old.
But then again, he’s not the average 18-year-old, is he?
In 2020, Zhong launched his own e-signing startup, Rabbit Sign, which runs on Amazon Web Services, which in turn is creating a case study on his company. One of the people he is working with at Amazon suggested applying for a job there. This reminded him of the time — back when he was only 13 — when a recruiter from Google, impressed with his profile on software development platform Github, had reached out asking if he’d be interested in an interview.
“That obviously didn’t pan out; I was too young,” Zhong told Palo Alto Online.
But he went back to Google recently to check if the opportunity was still available.
After a multi-round interview process that lasted for several months, he finally got the offer letter. Presently, he’s going through initial onboarding at Google.
“My family is obviously ecstatic. It’s a big milestone in my life,” he said. “A lot of my friends actually found out through the media story before I had a chance to tell them. That was funny. A guy I’d lost contact with reached out and said congrats.”
Not surprisingly, he is a hero at his former school.
“One of my English teachers asked me to be a guest speaker in her class. That was pretty cool; I was a senior in her class and never thought I’d be…
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