A high school graduate with a stellar grade point average, near perfect test scores, and a tech startup he founded when he was a sophomore, was rejected by dozens of colleges, including state schools. Then he landed a job at Google.
When Stanley Zhong, who graduated from Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, in 2023, was rejected by 14 of the 18 colleges and universities to which he applied, he and his advisers were dumbfounded.
Zhong was a standout student: He had an unweighted 3.96 grade point average and scored 1590 on his SATs. He had also been a finalist in multiple global computer coding contests and founded a free electronic signature startup called RabbitSign.
Zhong was rejected by his first-choice school, Stanford, which wasn’t all too surprising, he said. But he did not expect the rejection letters he received from some of the state schools he had applied to, including University of California, Davis; University of California, Santa Barbara; and California Polytechnic State University.
“No one can say they expect to get into Stanford, Berkeley or MIT, but I applied to a few state schools where I thought I had a better chance,” Zhong told CBS MoneyWatch.
Nan Zhong
No reasons given, just “you’re rejected”
With no elucidation provided from colleges and universities on their decision-making, all he could do was speculate as to why he had received so many rejections.
“I didn’t get any feedback from any admissions offices. You don’t get reasons, you just get ‘you’re rejected,'” Zhong said. “For some of them it was 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 deserve to know what we should be doing in order to get into these colleges.”
Zhong and his…
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