Why I Applied to 60 Colleges
Feb 14, 2022
By the time I finished high school, I had applied to over 60 colleges.
People assumed I was desperate to get accepted somewhere. I wasn’t.
The truth is: I did it because I was curious.
Most people apply to 5–10 schools and follow a clean path: safety, target, reach. But I didn’t see the application process as a funnel — I saw it as a system. And I wanted to understand how that system responded when it was stress-tested.
What happens when you push volume to the limit?
How do different schools evaluate the same story?
How many versions of me can exist in other people’s eyes?
I didn’t hire a college consultant. I didn’t overthink essays. I just kept applying.
Some apps were thoughtful. Some were last-minute. Some were built just to see what would happen. And somewhere in the middle of all that motion, I realized:
I wasn’t trying to get accepted. I was trying to understand selection itself.
The Offers Came — But I Didn’t Go
In the end, I got into 40+ schools. That included top-tier programs, Ivy Leagues, and elite scholarships. People congratulated me like I’d won something. But I didn’t feel like I had.
I didn’t apply because I thought college would define me. I applied because I wanted to learn what happens when you reverse-engineer the process. And once I did, I realized I didn’t need to follow it.
By that time, I had already built and launched a product. I had users. I had customers. I had already raised venture funding for something I believed could change how developers write and maintain code. So I asked myself:
Should I spend four years learning how to build…
or keep building something that was already alive?
I chose the second option.
Why I’m Glad I Did It Anyway
People ask me if I regret applying to so many schools when I didn’t even go. I don’t. If anything, I’m glad I did. Because it showed me something deeper:
Sometimes we do things not for the reward — but to reveal our thinking.
Applying to 60 colleges wasn’t a cry for validation. It was a signal of how I approach systems. It reflected my instinct to test, to learn from scale, and to treat decision-making itself as a problem worth understanding.
That mindset didn’t come from a classroom. It came from building, from watching systems break under pressure, and from asking: how far can this go before it gives me something new back?
From 60 Applications to One Direction
Today, I build Kodezi — not because it was the safe path, but because it wasn’t.
College would have been structured, predictable, approved.
Startups are none of those things. But they are real.
They force you to learn fast. To act before you’re ready. To build systems people don’t know they need yet. And that, to me, has always been the most honest education I could ask for.