I just submitted my Stanford application, and I can’t deny it was a huge relief. I was actually thinking about whether it was worth applying to Stanford this year. While filling out the application, however, I saw huge growth in myself within a year.
Growing up, I never had any kind of elite education. I was born in a city where the quality of education is significantly lower than in the major cities of China. I went to public schools throughout my primary and high school years. The majority of my classes were taught in Mandarin. We had English classes, but we only learned how to do multiple-choice questions and write short essays.
When I decided to study abroad, I started teaching myself English. From listening to speaking, I listened to audio clip by audio clip, correcting my pronunciation and flow when speaking. When I reached the minimum grade required for applying to college, I was confident and thought I could handle a life where I speak a language that is not yet fully mine.
But life is brutal. The moment I landed in the US, my language system was buffered. I couldn’t understand what people were talking about, didn’t know how to tip at a restaurant, and didn’t understand how to initiate small talk. There was a period of time in my first year that I was depressed, especially during daylight saving time in 2023, when the sun set around 4:40 PM, it would be completely dark by 5 PM, and that was when I was listening to JVKE’s “this is how autumn feels like,” working at the dining hall, living a life that felt out of my control.
Working at the dining hall was the least depressing thing in my first year, I would say. I worked 16 hours a week at DLG as a student worker, where my primary job was to help out the cooks. During that period, I made friends, built lots of meaningful connections, and also strengthened my communicational English. That’s where I started to understand real US college students. There is one student I met that I could never forget. Even after years passed, his confidence, humor, and intellect still remind me of typical SoCal students. That’s what I wanted to be.
In my second year, because of the requirement of my program (UCSB PaCE), I had to transfer to SBCC to continue my education. SBCC felt like a dead end to me at first. Smaller campus, fewer resources, and the feeling of having no belonging. I was depressed again, like a headless fly. Classes felt more hardcore at SBCC because they were all major courses. I was taking a Java class at the beginning of my time at SBCC, and that was my first coding class ever and the most abstract class to me.
Depression also came from unemployment, not because I was struggling financially, but because I felt like I didn’t belong to the school. To me, contributing to the community is a way of feeling belonging, but in my first year at SBCC, I wasn’t involved in the community that much. Because of that, I had more time researching schools and transfer plans. And I found Stanford.
I always wanted to go to Stanford when I was in high school because I heard it was popular. Yes, that is exactly what I thought at that time. There is a phrase in Chinese called “名校情结,” which explicitly describes people who are somehow obsessed with going to good schools. I was one of them. I wanted to go to Stanford just because of the title. So I decided to apply to Stanford, aiming to transfer in Fall 2025.
Obviously, that plan failed. I was rejected by Stanford. It wasn’t dramatic opening the rejection letter. In fact, I didn’t even realize I was opening the application status that day because I had just woken up. Seeing that I was rejected, somehow, was the answer that I wanted. I don’t know the exact reason why I was rejected, but I guess it was probably because I didn’t show academic readiness and I had a pretty low GPA.
But I didn’t give up applying.
After starting my second year at SBCC, my path became more clear. I started to realize that I don’t like pure CS. I want to study human-society-AI relations, that kind of intersection. Now I know this is called an interdisciplinary major. I first came to this thought when I was reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari in the spring of 2025. I was amazed by how the human brain works, how our brains are not reliable, and more importantly, how we always convince ourselves that we surpass all other species just because we have consciousness. For most people I think this is true, but I have my own opinions on consciousness. By reading that book, I started to think AI-human relations will be a huge deal in the future. So I discovered this program called Symbolic Systems at Stanford. This program captured my attention because it is an interdisciplinary major where you can take different classes and come up with some cool ideas. I loved it.
So I started preparing for this transfer in the summer of 2025. I studied for 2 months for the SAT while taking Multivariable Calculus. I started asking my professors if there were any tutoring jobs available, and I went to the library to ask if they needed a technician. Eventually, I became a tutor for my Multivariable Calculus professor for her Calculus I class. I also became a computer tutor at the LRC. In Fall 2025, I participated in ICPC as a member of SBCC’s team programming team. I ran for project manager at the CS club and general staff at the team programming club. In December, I submitted my UC application.
In January 2026, I developed SBCC Plan, an unofficial website for students to browse classes and see professors, inspired by UCSBPlat. I also fine-tuned an LLM on my MacBook. Also, I became a C++ tutor for SBCC’s CS 140 class.
In March, I started writing my essays for this application. My main essay is about how minority languages are absent from most AI training data, and how this creates inequality in language and education since AI is now changing the way people access information and so on. When I was filling out my extracurriculars, I saw my records from last year. After seeing how my essay shifted the focus from my trauma to real-world challenges in LLMs and languages, and how my extracurriculars changed from showing a potential community contributor to an actual contributor, I realized that growth in just a year is exponential.
This part kind of sounds like resume repeating. I think what I meant by listing all of these is that I think rejection is not the end of the story. Being rejected by Stanford in the first year brought me a lot of things I never expected. I found my community and found my passion. I am really grateful. For everyone I’ve met, every help, every conversation, regardless of whether it was small or big, they made me who I am.I just submitted my Stanford application, and I can’t deny it was a huge relief. I was actually thinking about whether it was worth applying to Stanford this year. While filling out the application, however, I saw huge growth in myself within a year.