Why I Applied to 60 Colleges

By the time I finished high school, I had applied to over 60 colleges. People assumed I was desperate to get in somewhere, but I wasn’t.

The truth is that I did it because I was curious. Most people apply to 5 to 10 schools and follow a clean path of safety, target, and reach schools. 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. I wanted to know what happens when you push volume to the limit, how different schools evaluate the same story, and how many versions of me could exist in other people’s eyes.

I didn’t hire a college consultant, and I didn’t overthink essays. I just kept applying. Some applications were thoughtful, some were last-minute, and some were built just to see what would happen. 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 it didn’t feel that way to me. 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 and customers, and I had already raised venture funding for something I believed could change how developers write and maintain code. So the question I asked myself was whether I should 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 things, 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 myself, 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, and approved. Startups are none of those things, but they are real. They force you to learn fast, act before you’re ready, and build systems people don’t know they need yet. To me, that has always been the most honest education I could ask for.