Latest news with #Yadegari
New York Post
08-05-2025
- Business
- New York Post
LI teen tech whiz Zach Yadegari — creator of $30M health app — makes college decision after all 8 Ivy League schools rejected him
This Long Island genius is taking his talents to Florida. Tech whiz Zach Yadegari, 18, who boasts an impressive 4.0 GPA and 34 ACT score, committed to the University of Miami on April 30 after he was rejected from 15 of the 18 schools he applied to, including every Ivy League institution. 'Update: I officially committed to Umiami,' Yadegari wrote to his 45,300 followers on X. Advertisement Yadegari, of Rosslyn, NY, is a tech developer and has made over $30 million before setting foot on a college campus due to his AI-calorie counting app, Cal AI. 4 Long Island native and tech founder Zach Yadegari announced his commitment to the University of Miami on April 30, 2025. Courtesy of Zach Yadegari The program, which launched in 2024, allows users to track their daily calorie intake by snapping photos of their food. Advertisement The future Hurricane experienced a turbulent application process despite massive success with his grades and business venture. In March, Yadegari revealed that he received rejection letters from all eight Ivy League schools plus MIT, Stanford, Washington University, Duke, USC, the University of Virginia, NYU and Vanderbilt. 4 The University of Miami's campus in Coral Gables, Florida on Oct. 16, 2024. Felix Mizioznikov – 4 Zach Yadegari shared a list of the 15 schools that rejected him despite his grades and business success. Advertisement According to the tech whiz, he may not have fit into what universities were looking for in potential students. 'I think that college admissions tries to place students in this rubric, a very tight box, that makes it difficult for students with achievements outside of school, like an entrepreneur, to really stand out,' he told Fox News. Yadegari said he wanted to go to college because he missed out on 'a lot of social events' in recent years. Advertisement 'I'm 18, I want to hang out with other 18-year-olds. I don't want to go straight into the business world, just yet,' he added. The University of Miami, Georgia Tech and the University of Texas were the only schools to accept his application. 'I didn't expect to be accepted to all of these colleges, however, I did expect to at least be accepted to a couple of the top schools I was applying to,' Yadegari told The Post in April. 'I think that entrepreneurial accomplishments may not be fully appreciated.' The teen, who has been coding since he was 7 and had his first project on Apple's App Store when he was 12, said he only began to feel the weight of his situation after he was rejected from Stanford. 'I held out hope for Stanford, but then when I opened their rejection letter, all of the prior rejections just flooded in and really hit me at once,' Yadegari previously told The Post. Not letting the mental anguish get to him, Yadegari compared his life to other successful entrepreneurs who didn't need higher education. 4 Zach Yadegari's personal essay published to X after revealing the 15 colleges that rejected him. Advertisement '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,' he wrote in a personal essay. '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,' he added.
CBS News
02-05-2025
- Business
- CBS News
18-year-old from Long Island creates Cal AI calorie counting app worth millions
An 18-year-old high school senior on Long Island is the founder and CEO of an artificial intelligence-based calorie counting app that's now worth millions. Zachary Yadegari said all he needed to get started was a computer and coding skills. "Cal AI is an app where you track the calories you are eating just by taking a picture of your food," Yadegari said. Cal AI has over five million downloads. He started the building the app at Roslyn High School. "My whole life, I've grown up on all this new technology," Yadegari said. Family handout Teachers say he developed his coding skills as a 7-year-old prodigy. By age 10, he was leading his classmates in coding. At 12, he was winning hackathons against college kids, and published his first app, Speed Soccer. At 14, his website Totally Science launched, and later sold for six figures. HIs latest creation is Cal AI. It takes a team of 17 employees across four continents and several time zones, keeping his siblings and parents awake. "Late at night, he's actually conducting business. I shrug and go back to bed," his mother Debi Yadegari said. Cal AI project yearly revenue at $30 million. Zach Yadegari demonstrates the Cal AI app by taking a snapshot of his lunch. CBS News New York Yadegari demonstrated the app by taking a picture of his sushi lunch, which the app calculated at 400 calories and identified the rice, salmon, avocado and spicy mayo involved. The app has a 90% accuracy rate. Billionaire tech giants like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs were all college dropouts. But Yadegari, already a millionaire, wants to go to college. So why don't colleges want him? "Despite my 4.0 GPA and 34 ACT, I was rejected from all the top schools I applied to. All of the Ivy Leagues, and then Stanford," Yadegari said. Yadegari thinks colleges put applicants in boxes with no way to value entrepreneurial accomplishments. His friends say he remains humble. "I think the most grounding is that I still go to classes and still have to raise my hand to go to the bathroom," he said. "I'm still a normal high schooler. I'm going to prom in a couple of months."
Boston Globe
22-04-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
The secret to writing a great college admissions essay
Advertisement 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. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Commenters were quick to disparage Yadegari's writing, sparking a national conversation about the purpose of the college essay and the absurdity of an exercise that asks students to 'disguise [their accomplishments] as modesty,' as Rob Henderson Advertisement Writing on his But because we have created a system that values doing over thinking, many students struggle with the reflective aspect of the essay, becoming so hyper-focused on touting their accomplishments that they forget to consider the things that make them fundamentally human. And that is, presumably, why the college essay has recently come under fire: We are all thinking about it — and, indeed, about the entire application process — incorrectly. Neither a resume nor a telenovela Mounk's position, for instance, is the same as that of many of the X commenters, decrying the college essay system as unfair and claiming that the admissions process 'encourages the whole elite stratum of society … to conceive of themselves in terms of the hardships they have supposedly suffered.' Given this thesis, it makes sense that Mounk would come to Yadegari's defense — the student wrote an essay about his accomplishments rather than about the obstacles he had to overcome. But Mounk misidentifies the point of the college essay — it has never been about writing a so-called sob story, nor should it be. In fact, I agree with Mounk's assessment of the absurdity of asking students to produce melodramatic slop. I urge my own students never to tell a sob story if they can help it, for such essays always backfire. Advertisement It is unlikely that Yadegari was rejected from the most prestigious schools because he leaned into his accomplishments instead of painting himself as a victim — or failed to learn the language of the elites for that matter. Rather, Yadegari was probably rejected because, in his essay at least, his personality does not come across very favorably. At one point he even rips into the sort of institution he is attempting to appeal to: 'So you're not going, right?' VCs, founders, mentors—nearly everyone reinforced the same narrative: I didn't need college. These are the musings of an 18-year-old who comes off as arrogant and pretentious, bragging about earnings and connections without giving colleges the least bit of an idea about who he is — or, at least, about the hard work he put into his achievements. I am not sure how we arrived at the notion that a college essay needs to present either a resume of accomplishments or the outline of a bad telenovela, but neither of these is desirable. The Common App Advertisement There are, after all, only a finite number of prestigious extracurricular activities that students can pursue at age 17 — from research with an MIT professor to an internship at KPMG — but no one student will have the same lived experience as another. In fact, when I work with students, I don't start by launching into what makes a good college essay. I start by presenting them with the personal essay as an art form — I might have them read David Sedaris or George Orwell — and then zero in on the college essay once they understand how to put together a successful piece of writing. For many students, these exercises might be the first time in their lives that they interact with the concept of the personal essay, a form of writing that has fallen by the wayside in a society that increasingly devalues personal inquiry. So it is no wonder that students like Yadegari approach the essay as a resume rather than as a moment of introspection. I hope to at least move students away from thinking in terms of 'what a college is looking for' and toward tapping into their authentic stories as they demonstrate their readiness for higher-level thinking. Some of my most talented students have taken time to reflect on the mundane — such as a student who gained admission to Cornell by writing about her pet turtle — or tap into the fantastical, such as a student who ended up at Penn after telling admissions officers about her desire to become a Disney princess. These students, of course, also boast stellar accomplishments and strong academic credentials, but what helped them secure admission was the imagination, creativity, and authenticity displayed in their essays. Advertisement In a sea of rigged activities, grade inflation, and near-perfect SAT scores, the college essay is the only component of the college application process that cannot be gamed or bought. It's true that students can resort to AI tools or hire a college counselor to help them polish their essays, but no amount of heavy edits can bring out a student's authentic voice — and no counselor or ChatGPT model will ever be able to identify the facets of the student's experience that have led them to become the individual they are today. In a society that continually
