Stanley Zhong starting working at Google from this week.
Tech giant Google has hired a high school graduate, who was rejected by 16 colleges, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Melon and Stanford. According to ABC7, 18-year-old Stanley Zhong, from Palo Alto, graduated from Gunn High School this year. He scored 1590 out of 1600 in Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), which thousands take for admission to undergraduate schools, and even started his own start-up RabbitSign in sophomore year but was rejected by 16 of the 18 colleges he applied to.
"Well, some of them were certainly expected. You know, Stanford, MIT, you know, it's, it is what it is, right?...Some of the state schools I really thought, you know, I had a good chance and turns out a bit of a chance I had, I didn't get in," the teenager told ABC7.
But after a wave of rejections, Zhong got a full-time job as a software engineer at Google. He started his new job this week.
The teenager's story was highlighted by a witness testifying at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing. The news outlet said that the goal of the hearing was to consider how this summer's Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions is shaping university policies, policies that confound Stanley Zhong.
The student was accepted by University of Texas and University of Maryland. He decided to enrol at University of Texas, but put that on hold to when he got the Google job offer.
Stanley told the outlet that he still night take admission in a college, but for now, the teenager is enjoying himself, not on a college campus, but the Google campus.