I have a low GPA.
I have a UW GPA of 3.2 and a Weighted/UC/CSU GPA of a 3.6.
I taught myself how to program since I was 13 and I now am fluent in 5 coding languages: Swift, Python, Ruby, jQuery, and PHP.
I have many projects that I’ve taken upon. My 2 biggest projects are currently under development and I’ve kept them under wraps for a while. All I’m going to say is that I’m working on a website and an iPhone/iPad app that is free to download; but there are ads. The money I make from ads will be donated to a few charities/organizations.
I live a comfortable life really. My parents are from Spanish countries; my father is from El Salvador and my mother is from Colombia. They didn’t go to college but we are living very comfortably. They are supportive of me and provided me with the technology I needed to start learning how to code back when I was 13. I wanted to put it all to good use and that’s how the 2 projects listed above came about.
Here where I live, almost no one codes; I felt isolated. Don’t get me wrong, I have lots of friends where I live, but they didn’t share the same interests as me in technology. Go figure but I live north of San Francisco… But if I drive an hour south, I am in Silicon Valley, where I have recently made friends with lots of people who enjoy coding.
So a few months ago I constantly looked for opportunities in technology. For that I met a few amazing people who I am now good friends with that are Computer Science Majors at Stanford. One of them emailed me about a hackathon in the eBay/PayPal headquarters, and they invited me to it even though it was full. I immediately responded and said that I would go; I was very excited about this opportunity. I felt so amazing by meeting lots of kids my age and older that shared the same interests in Technology. I felt at home. I made lots of friends and talk to them everyday.
Over these last few weeks I started to reach out for students in my area that were interested in learning to code and this month I set up a trip to the eBay and PayPal headquarters. There will be mentors and I will also help them to code.
I also got recently accepted to a whole summer development ‘internship’ per se. I was picked among lots of other applicants from around the world that are high-caliber in programming. The admission process was the same as one with Google itself or Facebook. You apply online, then setup an online video chat interview. After those stages, if you progress, you need to do coding interviews; which means they described a program, and we code it for them in a certain amount of time. We will work with developers from Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox, just to name a few, to develop an app that will be shipped to the app store by the end of summer. It will be a stimulation of working at a tech company, while every person that got accepted will have their own app released. We will also start to network with software developers in those big tech companies.
I also learned some algorithms. I was invited to a meeting with a Senior Software Engineer at Google to work on some Artificial Intelligence. There I learned many algorithms from him and in one night we programmed our computers to predict the weather. Two of the algorithms that he taught me are also used in Google Search.
The thing is, I am really afraid that because of my low GPA, after high school, it will come to an end. I feel like I’m going to be stuck at a not-so-good university and I won’t reach my full potential in the Computer Science field. All I want is to get into a good Comp. Sci university where I will continue to be surrounded by people who share the same interests in Computer Science and collaborate with them. My goals in college is to go on their study abroad programs or mission programs and teach less fortunate kids how to code.
Just please don’t be too harsh. I don’t want to get too into it but during my sophomore year my aunt had been diagnosed with cancer. It hurt my grades in the beginning and I ended up with a few C’s which is why I have a 3.2 UW GPA. I pulled through and started to get my grades up again. Then I got news that she had beaten cancer and is now cancer-free. It had taken almost a year. My UW GPA will still be very low because of those few C’s I got during the time I had gotten the news that she had been diagnosed with cancer. When I was told she was cancer-free that gave me even more motivation because I know that if my aunt can beat cancer, anything is possible.
