How even creating a $30M app won’t get you into the Ivy League
4.0 GPA. Great!
34 ACT. Awesome!
Founder of a $30M AI health app…whoa.
When you read these accomplishments, how do you think this student did with his college applications?
Well, it turns out he was rejected by 15 out of 18 colleges including all Ivies, Stanford, and MIT, so wait, what’s going on here?
Despite his academic achievements and incredible startup success at only 18 years old, Zach Yadegari made headlines recently for publicly sharing how he was rejected by almost all the colleges he applied to.
Debates around meritocracy aside, I want to focus on his personal statement which he also publicly shared online.
But before reading my analysis below, take a read yourself of Zach Yadegari’s personal statement and note what your impressions are.
Now, here are my notes (indented and italicized) as I read through his essay a second time:
Analyzing Zach Yadegari’s personal statement
“I will never go to college,” I texted my mom on January 14, 2019—and for years, I believed this with every fiber of my being.
At a young age, I saw that kids were funneled down the same narrow path: get good grades, attend a good college, land a good job, live a good life. It felt like a prescriptive formula, devoid of individuality. I rejected convention and took to self-learning.
This is the setup where I’m led to believe that the student believes the path of going to college is a societal expectation without personal choice. This has to be paid off by the end of the essay.
By age 7, I was coding. By 10, I was giving lessons for $30/hour. By 12, I published my first app on the App Store. By 14, my online gaming website was earning $60,000 annually. And by 16, I had a six-figure exit. YouTube was my personal tutor, teaching me everything from programming to filing my LLC’s taxes.
Toward the end of my junior year, while classmates prepared for exams that would ostensibly dictate their futures, I was returning from a startup accelerator, emboldened on my unconventional path. I had launched my latest app, Cal AI, which tracks calories just by taking a picture of food.
It feels like he’s trying to differentiate himself from his peers, but there’s a sense of arrogance because of how it’s written and sounds. He’s also just listing his accomplishments at this point. I’m hoping this ties back to who he is as a person, what he’s learned, and what his goals are.
Encouraged by initial positive feedback, I decided to move to San Francisco with my co-founder for the summer. Within a week, I found myself interviewing my first employee. Who was I to question a man with 24 more years of experience and a family to support? My imposter syndrome became a source of motivation, pushing me to be the last person to leave the office every night.
“So you’re not going, right?” VCs, founders, mentors—nearly everyone reinforced the same narrative: I didn’t need college.
Cal AI had become the fastest-growing app in its category. Our team grew to 15 employees, our users had collectively lost tens of thousands of pounds, and investors were constantly trying to throw money at us (which we rejected).
Then one night, I refreshed my App Store Connect dashboard and saw it:
One million dollars of revenue. In the last 30 days.
As the dopamine surged through my body and I threw my hands in the air in victory—something felt missing. What was next? It wasn’t loneliness… it was a question of purpose. Was this hedonic treadmill of capitalism what the rest of my life was designated for? Yes, my app was helping hundreds of thousands of people lose weight. But would I ever feel this rush again? Was my north star money, pride, fame… or something else entirely?
This is a hard pivot and the line of "hedonic treadmill of capitalism" is a strong thing to say. It needs to be earned very quickly right afterwards, but it falls flat as the focus is on a dopamine rush. The insight and exploration isn't deep enough.
A month later, I was still searching. Serendipity brought me to the Ryoan-ji rock garden in Kyoto—where a young Jobs once searched for a similar answer. No—I wasn’t magically struck with the right answer like I wanted. But the deliberate imperfection of the stones—the paradox of asymmetry as both chaos and order—lodged itself in my mind, a quiet contradiction I couldn’t let go. Maybe life is just this—a tapestry of contradictions where meaning isn’t found in resolution but in the act of exploring the in-between.
In my rejection of the collegiate path, I had unwittingly bound myself to another framework of expectations: the archetypal dropout founder. Instead of schoolteachers, it was VCs and mentors steering me toward a direction that was still not my own.
The essay starts to get somewhere in the last line of the paragraph as he begins to self-reflect, but it just ends there.
The rejection of the collegiate path paragraph that introduces the idea of the archetypal dropout founder is really rough. It still reads like a setup rather than a strong, personal insight. It feels too fresh and rushed. It’s not something he's really reflecting upon. I also want to highlight that he’s finally opening up at about 465/650 words or 2/3rds through the essay. Most of this could’ve been condensed into the first 1/3rd of the essay.
College, I came to realize, is more than a mere right of passage. It is the conduit to elevate the work I have always done. In this next chapter, I want to learn from humans—both professors and students—not just from computers or textbooks.
This is supposed to be the big realization, but it falls flat yet again because it's vague, superficial, and unearned from the previous shallow insights. By this point, I don't know why he truly wants to go to college. How are you going to benefit from college when you’ve already accomplished your goal? The tone of this entire essay makes me question if I’d want someone like you on campus. The style (using corporate words like six figure exit, north star, comparing yourself to Steve Jobs) and shallow insights compound to make him sound braggy and full of himself by this point unfortunately...
I began my journey fiercely independent, determined to forge my own path. Now, I see that individuality and connection are not opposites, but complements. We are all individuals, but we are also part of something larger. Through college, I will contribute to and grow within that larger whole, empowering me to leave an even greater lasting, positive impact on the world.
What is this "connection" and "larger whole" that's now only being mentioned at the end?
Now, nearly five years later, I am ready to send a new text: “I’m going to college.”
Word count: 648
The #1 reason why this essay is bad
After reading this essay, what do you think of this student?
To me, it’s clear he’s very bright, motivated, ambitious, and committed. He’s obviously a very accomplished person already with life changing money and skills. Heck, he could even be one of the next leaders in tech like a young Mark Zuckerberg or that guy who made Apple big. This is great and all, but is there anything else we learned about him? I don’t really know who he is as a person outside of his accomplishments which we probably would’ve already gathered from his activity list. I have no idea how he felt about his experiences because he didn’t talk about them. But, what’s most glaring is that his essay begs the question:
What does he need college for?
From this essay, I don’t know. The reason he gives is vague — “contribute to and grow within that larger whole, empowering me to leave an even greater lasting, positive impact on the world.” What does that actually mean? I’m not even sure if he really knows because it’s a traumatic change to suddenly become a multimillionaire before you can even order a beer.
So with all this said, if you were an admissions officer at a college with limited spots, would you accept this student?
Success is relative, not relatable
But even despite all this, I do believe Zach Yadegari was successful at the end of the day. He got into selective schools as an out-of-state applicant:
Georgia Tech (16% acceptance rate, 9% for out-of-state students)
UT Austin (Texas law requires UT Austin to fill 90% of their incoming class with Texas residents, so the acceptance rate for out-of-state students is much lower than the the published ~29%)
University of Miami (19% acceptance rate)
Great achievements alone will not get you into highly selective colleges, or anywhere else for that matter because the truth is: no one cares. It’s what you have to say about them and how they’ve shaped you that matters. Otherwise, people can’t relate to you because you simply come off as a resume.