Here's my story. Should I still apply?

Procka
Fri, 06 Jan 2017 00:46:32 +0000

I know this is somewhat of a repetitive sounding post, but are these colleges worth applying for? I’ve worked very hard to achieve what I have and I’ve been considering the option of college. Allow me to explain. Yes, the post is long and if you read it, I’d be greatly thankful.

Freshman year I took a web design class and got bored with the content of the course. It seemed too easy and not challenging enough. I would go home every day and learn in-depth web design and excelled incredibly in the class. I managed to complete 1 and 1/2 week long assignments in 1 or 2 days. I managed to get 100% in the class and went on to excel in all of my tech classes. However, I didn’t bother to get A’s in my other classes.

I get it. This may sound like an ego-stroke. I try to keep emotion out of personal writing and be as honest as possible. So I won’t lie when I say I had zero interest in school. Zero. I would sit in math class and write about ideas I have for websites and company ideas. My head seemed to always be in the clouds and not in my school textbooks (how cliche). Instead, I was reading business books and biographies of my favorite entrepreneurs.

I would then go on to come up with many company ideas and attempt a few, eventually getting bored and moving on. Come Junior year, I realized I wanted to go to college. I aced all of my classes, landing me with a 3.99 GPA at the end of the year (a teacher failed me on a few assignments because they were late and refused to allow me to turn them in for partial credit, killing my grade down to an 89 percent for a quarter).

The prior summer, I had somehow impressed the CEO of a $600m SoCal startup in conversation with one of his employees that he bumped into while stacking chairs after a company meeting: my brother. The CEO asked to meet with me when I came to visit to have some “coffee.” Come time, I had the meeting and that very CEO seemed to take a liking in me. Apparently, my brother reported to me that this CEO told my brother that he was very impressed by me – I believe wanting to me under his wing, but I doubt he explicitly said this.

Fast forward 6 months: I had come up with a few analytic tool ideas while lying and bed and needed to write them down somewhere. I decided to do so in a letter to that one CEO. I pitched it as a free idea and told him I was only doing it because I needed to share the idea and get feedback (the truth). It was a success. He told me he loved the idea and was looking forward to discussing it. He also said we should explore an internship. Wow.

I didn’t expect the CEO to be serious when he said he wished to discuss the product idea. Come to find out, he was serious. He had the VP of Product contact me and request a meeting. The meeting was an incredible success. The VP of Product brought the 2-piece idea further up the ranks of the company and it cleared. I found out they were going to prototype my idea and put it out to the world.

I then went on to complete my internship as part of the Product Development team at this company and met incredible people and learned many things about product development. I also had a good amount of influence over a few decent changes to company product. All of this at 17.

My final High School GPA came out to 3.5 due to my lack of interest before Junior year (B average first two years). My I managed to get a 32 on my ACTs and have awesome references. For example, my English teacher who I spent MANY hours with along with the optional recommendation from the CEO of this company. I want to apply to 5 Ivy Leagues (Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and Brown) along with Stanford. I feel I could draw a decent amount of attention from at least one school. I already know I’m not a student that would impress any of these schools based upon scores alone.

I would like to thank you for reading this long post. It’s very important that I receive insight from those who are experienced in the college application process. Thank you!