To the rejected

College admissions decisions are rolling out now. It seems they've grown even less reasonable.

I'm writing this for anyone who just got rejected from top colleges because they focused on coding cool projects in school rather than min-maxing admissions.

A lot of people will tell you your grief will seem silly in retrospect, but frankly it never did for me. The problem with a lackluster pedigree is that you have to convince people you're worth knowing, rather than them just assuming you are. This is okay if you're comfortable with a quiet tech job, because that only requires a few engineers to recognize your talent. But if you want a career that involves interacting with a lot of people, this kind of thing slows down your exponential growth, which is a big deal.

You can compensate by grabbing some other prestigious badge, like by joining a high profile tech company, which people in your field will weigh far more than college. But nothing has quite the cross-industry, cross-age recognition that universities do, which matters if you need to, e.g., sell services to execs at non-tech businesses. Being underestimated by people outside your bubble also changes your general social experience of life; you inadvertently become more married to tech.

I don’t know if there exists any “silver lining” to rejection that could have made me feel better. The best one is perhaps the idea that the difficulty mode of your life is now set, and if you’re truly a god gamer then you’ll embrace the higher difficulties. And there will be people who respect you more for it.

So what now? If you don’t intend to lower your ambitions, in order to still achieve them you’ll need to multiply your risk tolerance and expose yourself to opportunities to get lucky. There are a lot more such opportunities in SF than most would think (I’ve personally narrowly missed several that would have made me pretty rich, I expect to catch one shortly). I recommend visiting / moving here as soon as you can, meeting people at hackathons, building in public, and engaging with the internet. This is all really hard if you're introverted, which held me back, but you have time to find your rhythm. I’m down to hop on a call with anyone who needs it, just reach out here.