Coder Gautam codergautam

Common App & Stanford Essays

The following are my responses to the main Common App essay and the Stanford application questions. You're welcome to read them to try and understand how I got "in" to Stanford, or just for fun. Whatever you choose to try and take away from these essays, I hope you get something out of them. Or nothing at all, that works too. Enjoy.

A Brief Note

There's no secret formula. There are a lot of people more qualified than me that got denied. Even though they may have been more qualified, I beat them when it came to the essays. The most important part of your application is your essays, so I would encourage you to spend a lot of time on them. Spend time reflecting on who you are and how you can use your essays to communicate that. The readers of the over 40,000 Stanford applicants know a fake essay from a mile away. If you want to have a chance at admission, your essays need to be 100% authentic you, not 90% authentic you and 10% your mom/tutor/fake self.

If you plan to apply, I

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

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