Chris Dixon’s recent post about a buddy who got into MIT without a high school diploma reminded me of when I applied to college without a high school degree and got rejected everywhere I applied.

My sophomore year in high school my buddy Kevin wrote in English class about how Phineas and Gene in A Separate Peace were gay lovers.  You just don’t do that in one of the most conservative towns in Texas.  During a presentation by some local lawyers on Twelve Angry Men, I wrote on a sample jury form that my name was Poop Face and that I worked for Satan.  I showed up at class the next day which was empty except for my teacher and her shit-eating grin.  I got kicked out of English for a week.

Junior year I nearly failed English, Chemistry, and French.  I threw a pen at my French teacher in class one day and made her cry.  I failed my French AP test and got a 1 — the lowest possible score — on my Economics AP test. I’ve never met another person who’s gotten a 1 on an AP test.

My parents were the kind to get apoplectic at A minuses much less Cs and Ds with some Fs sprinkled in.  Lots of yelling and gnashing of teeth.

I worked out my escape: go to college now, far far away.  I found out that Caltech and Carnegie Mellon both accepted kids without high school diplomas.  I never considered MIT because I always imagined that it was a school full of ugly girls.  Astute, really, although that doesn’t explain why I applied to Caltech.  I guess it was only much later that I even met a girl from Caltech. 

While I was totally dysfunctional in high school, I always felt on the inside like I was quite capable and that I wasn’t a loser at life.  Ya know, in high school, you see dudes who hang out with nerds and don’t make good grades — and many of those kids are really smart.  Then they’re the kids who hang out with nerds, don’t make good grades, and are actually pretty dumb.  I was pretty sure I didn’t fall into the last group.

I had nearly flunked out of high school, but at the same time, I had taken a bunch of college math coursework at the local university.  I took calculus, algebra, analysis, topology, and a few other courses at Texas A&M and had done well.  At 16, I tutored college kids in differential equations, graded papers for linear algebra, and took a fancy reading course for advanced undergrads. 

I didn’t think I had much of a chance at Caltech.  And I got rejected.  But I was pretty sure I was going to get into CMU based on standardized test scores and my math skillz.  I remember the morning I dialed into my internet connection, waited, waited, waited, and then pulled up the screen to see if I’d gotten in.  And it was more rejection.

In retrospect, it was a really bad decision to write my personal statement about Starcraft.  I imagine with a candidate like me, the question of maturity is first and foremost in their heads and nothing I could say about my mastery of Zerg would help change their mind on that point.  Yes, I even pointed out how I had sick macro and that I had exhibited mad 2v2 leadership abilities.

This story has a conventional ending.  I had a fun senior year with further social acculturation.  I applied to college with a high school diploma and got in.  I’m a normal human.

you are what you tweet

chattelme:

dear friends, in my free time, i made a new website with my cousin james where you can review a human being like he or she is a restaurant.  human beings have pages that list their social media presences where anyone can write a review and give him/her a rating out of 5 stars.  the site is a reaction to the intersection of personal branding, social media, and “beautiful design” (e.g., about.me/flavors.me).  it’s like how normal people used blogger but livejournal was filled with a bunch of emo freaks, or how facebook was sterile but myspace was a visual nightmare of personality.  with http://chattel.me, i’ve attempted to build the nightmare emo freak site of personal platform pages.

what’s the internet for if not to make human relationships torture and to get desensitized to violent sexual imagery?  commentators talk about disruption of industry, say, the way that napster disrupted the music industry.  with this site i’m hoping for no less than the disruption of the practice of interpersonal relationships.  we all know that stalking someone or talking behind someone’s back is bad, yet most of us have an insatiable appetite for it.  chattel.me will make it impossible to look your friends in the eye.

fair’s fair, and i’ve added a page for myself here: http://www.chattel.me/humen/walter-chen-new-york-ny.  i’ve already scoured my mental rolodex for who would merely think of me as “meh…” to no avail, and i’ve hit refresh a few times.  i imagine that the site’s primary engagement mechanism will be neurosis and narcissism and it’s working fairly well on me.

chattel.me is a play on the word “chatter” and a reference to the place where property and the person meet.  making a living on the internet seems to mean packaging the self as a product (obviously) but that seems to happen even to people simply living on the internet.  accordingly, the treatment and critique of persons needs to go deeper than the superficiality of representation which is basically just advertisement.  

right now the site is in “single-player mode”, which means that it lacks critical mass so i simply invite you to check out chattel.me, add a page for your self, share it with your friends, and find out what they think about your worth as a human.