- Bill Gates applied to three different Ivy League colleges and experimented with his persona, emphasizing different experiences and career goals for each one. The Microsoft cofounder would later famously drop out of Harvard to create one of the world’s biggest companies.
While Bill Gates famously dropped out of college to cofound one of the biggest companies in the world, it turns out when he was applying, he was just as meticulous as the rest of us.
Among the “tantalizing menu” of options Gates saw when researching schools were classes in pure math, cognitive psychology, the politics of war, management theory, and advanced chemistry, according to his memoir Source Code: My Beginnings.
“These were the kinds of classes that could broaden me in all sorts of new ways,” the self-made multibillionaire wrote.
In the end, Gates applied to three Ivy League schools—Harvard, Princeton, and Yale—and tailored his application for each one.
In particular, he experimented with his “persona,” emphasizing different future career choices and interests. To do so, he leveraged the skills he took away from a drama club he joined as a hobby.
“As I learned in drama class, each was a performance—one actor, three characters,” he wrote in the book.
When applying for Princteton, Gates said he wanted to be an engineer who knew how to write software, so he emphasized his math grades and his coding samples.
For Yale, he said his goal was government work or law, so he talked up his high school experience working as a congressional page in Washington, D.C., his love for the Boy Scouts, and his pursuit of dramatic arts.
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Finally, for Harvard, Gates called attention to his programming skills, condensing all his experience into 600 words in cursive font on his mom’s Selectric typewriter. He included mention of a stint teaching computer science to his fellow high schoolers, which he said at the time was the hardest thing he’d done.
Surprisingly, he still wasn’t convinced that a future in technology was for him.
“Work with the computer has proved to be a great opportunity to have a lot of fun, earn some money, and learn a lot. However, I don’t plan to continue concentrating in this field. Right now I am most interested in business or law,” he said at the end of his Harvard essay.
One thing he was convinced of was that he didn’t want to be like everyone else, which is why attending MIT was never a serious option.
“If I went someplace like MIT, I felt I’d be a math nerd surrounded by other math nerds. That prospect sounded too…narrow. (Which is why I had blown off my interview at MIT that summer and played pinball instead),” he wrote.
Although eventual Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen wanted him to forgo college completely, Gates wanted to go.
“I wanted the chance to see how I stacked up against the other brainy kids from a much wider pool than Lakeside [School],” he wrote.
Ultimately, Gates got into all three Ivy League schools, but chose Harvard, where he would meet future Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. He left just two semesters shy of graduating, and the rest is history.