Hi guys, I’m a latino applicant. I started to code since I was 12 years old in a little town I lived here in Colombia. I was forced by communist guerrillas to leave my town (they tried to kill my mom, kidnapped my uncles and recruited my friends) and move to a bigger city where I, fortunately, had access to the Internet. That allowed me to improve my hacking skills and start working for an Information Security company when I was in 10th grade in high school. After that, I moved into a company backed by Y Combinator (the most prestigious tech incubator in the world) where I worked as a Hacker In-house while I was still completing my last year in high school.
A few months before graduation, being 15 years old, I decided to start my own company. I worked extremely hard (14-16 hours a day) on the company and didn’t pay too much attention to school. I graduated with a low GPA because I decided to focus on my company and hacking skills (You have to consider here that the education in my school was pretty bad. I was always ahead of what they taught so I decided to educate myself on Computer Science).
The day I graduated I also received the notification that 500 Startups (second most prestigious tech incubator in Silicon Valley) wanted to invest in my company. In just 3 months I had grown the company from 0 to 8k users in more than 12 countries. I received 50.000 dollars from them as an angel investment and became the World’s youngest founder they have ever invested in.
I moved to Mexico City, took the company to 30k users in more than 24 countries and subsequently had to close shop as we weren’t able to monetize enough and keep the company alive. It obviously was a great experience to me and after that, I started working with big companies automating and improving their logistics with software, I became Tech Advisor to an entrepreneurship program hosted by the Colombian Government and lead different teams on software contracts.
Right now I have been working to apply to Stanford, Cornell and Penn. I will be taking the SAT in December and I am pretty confident that I will be able to get a score above the mid-range average of this universities. I also took the SAT Math Subject Test level 1 and scored a 680.
As you can see I have pretty strong skills in Computer Science, which is the major I want to pursue.
My question is: Do you think that I make a good applicant for this schools, even If I have a low GPA?