Will Stanford Overlook Horrendous Freshman & Junior Grades?

Data10
Tue, 15 Apr 2014 02:58:47 +0000

Last year someone on this forum started a similar thread asking if Stanford would overlook his weaker stats because of his amazing ECs, including starting a very successful internet business. He was admitted this year as an international applicant (likely more competitive than US applicants) with a ~2050 SAT and poor freshman year grades. Stanford values passions and what you do outside of the classroom and would love to have a web developer and entrepreneur who operates a very successful business. Several. other colleges have similar ideals. MIT once admitted a successful web entrepreneur who did not graduate from HS and whose application was mostly code he wrote. A more detailed summary is at http://cdixon.org/2011/03/24/mit-is-a-national-treasure/ (I wouldn’t count on this happening again.). However, colleges like Stanford also want admits who they are confident can handle the coursework. If you have poor junior year grades and a LOR from a teacher or GC talking about skipping classes, it won’t bode well for your application. Stanford is likely to overlook your freshman year. They re-calculate GPA without considering freshman year. Junior year is a different story and is quite important for admissions.

I also am a successful web developer and know how much it can absorb your time, especially if you code yourself. If your site is anything like mine, the income can change rapidly. I might be making several times more than I could working as an engineer one month, then the next month make a small fraction of that amount. Predicting income 5 or 10 years in the future is near impossible. If things don’t go well with the business 5 years from now, it’s good to have a degree and educational background to fall back on. Stanford would also allow you to improve your business and programming skills, get connections with lots of venture capitalists and amazing talented people, and put you in a great area of the country for anything related to software start ups. If you want to attend Stanford or other highly selective college, I’d suggest working with your teachers to try to see what can be done to bring up your current junior year grades. If you can’t keep up with the business, you can hire help an a low cost through one of the online project websites. One of the mistakes I made early on was trying to do everything myself. There are a lot of talented people out there who can not only help, but can likely introduce you to new ways of thinking, leading to a better finished product or more personal knowledge for the future.