Common App Essay Essay - Georgia Institute of Technology

"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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. Now, nearly five years later, I am ready to send a new text: "I'm going to college."