My Personal Journey

In 2016, I applied with very high hopes to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Cornell, Princeton, the University of Michigan, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). At the time, RIT was my “safety school”, and they responded pretty early with an acceptance. In the coming weeks however, I was rejected from pretty much every other school I applied to.

I certainly believed I was qualified. Qualifications notwithstanding, I’m sure the feeling of unworthiness is something that you can relate to. The college process is a brutal and dehumanizing process. I think that’s something we can all agree on. It’s impossible to expect that college admissions officers will grasp the entirety of your identity through a few paltry essays, no matter how good your writing skills are.

College rejection struck me particularly hard and for the following few weeks, I lost sight of my passion for computer science. I spent my summer relatively productively as a computer science teacher, but I won’t lie, it felt pointless. The first day of school at RIT was tough. I felt like I was stuck in a hole and I didn’t know what to make of myself or what I even wanted to pursue anymore.

It took a lot for me to finally reframe my point of view. The beginning of my fall semester was miserable. I wasn’t learning anything in my classes, but it helped me realize that college would be whatever I made of it. Even if I went to a prestigious Ivy-league school, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if I didn’t continue doing what I loved. The catalyst that helped me get back on track was probably writing on Medium. In addition to helping me focus my motivation, writing about my hackathon experiences and side projects helped drive my self-learning and pushed me to attend more hackathons and explore more about computer science on my own.

Talking to recruiters and tech companies at hackathons was part of what helped me broaden the scope of my vision. Take what you love doing and expand it beyond the scope of college. Your end goal isn’t to impress some college. I wanted to take my work and do something cool with it. I wanted to build something that people could use. I published a few npm modules during this time and built a lot of hackathon projects with friends. It felt great to be productive again, and it didn’t feel empty this time.

The college process doesn’t suck because you didn’t get into your dream school. It sucks because everything you worked for was invalidated when some college read your application and decided: you’re not good enough. Somehow, they decided that you weren’t qualified enough because of some numbers and a few sparse essays. It took me a very long time to get past that.

What I Learned