California high school grad lands job at Google after being rejected by 16 colleges

Google has hired a California high school graduate after he was rejected by 16 colleges including both Ivy League and state schools.

18-year-old Stanley Zhong graduated from Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, a city part of Silicon Valley. According to ABC7 Eyewitness News, he had a 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SATs and launched his own e-signing startup his sophomore year called RabbitSign.

Zhong was applying to colleges as a computer science major. He told ABC7 some of the applications, especially to the highly selective schools like MIT and Stanford were "certainly expected," but thought he had a good chance at some of the other state schools.

He had planned to enroll at the University of Texas, but has instead decided to put school on hold when he was offered a full-time software engineering job at Google.

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Zhong was rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges to which he applied: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UC Davis, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cornell University, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Caltech, University of Washington and University of Wisconsin.

He was accepted only by the University of Texas and University of Maryland.

A witness testifying to a Sept. 28 hearing to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce brought up Zhong's story in a session about affirmative action, which was outlawed in June by the Supreme Court at most colleges and universities.

Affirmative action was a decades-old effort to diversify campuses. The June Supreme Court ruling requires Harvard and the University of North Carolina, along with other schools, to rework their admissions policies and may have implications for places outside higher education, including the American workforce.

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