Stanley Zhong is an 18-year-old software engineer at Google. He graduated high school with a 4.42 GPA, a 1590 SAT score, but was also rejected or waitlisted from 16 out of 18 universities, including MIT and Stanford. Despite his credentials, it must have been very disappointing to not get into 90% of the universities he applied to, but that’s when Google offered him a job as an L4 software engineer, which is a temporary role, something that Stanley will do for a year before he enters the University of Texas.
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In these kinds of circumstances in a child’s life, parents must also be feeling the disappointment or discouragement that their children feel, and must be trying to console or empathize with them. So, it must have been a great relief and surprise to his parents when Stanley got the job at Google. Not for Nan Zhong, Stanley’s father, who wasn’t shocked at all upon learning that his son got a job. He says:
“I’ve seen him writing code since he was age 10. And along the way, he gave me enough shocks that I was no longer shocked [when he got the Google job]. He’s been great his whole life.”
For Nan, the No. 1 parenting rule he has lived by has been to take a hands-off approach. By that, he elaborates that he and his wife will support their son but will not push him toward one direction or another. Rather, they let him determine his own limits and find the motivation to seek and carve out his own path in life. Apart from this, Nan also shares other insights he gained as a parent raising Stanley over the years with CNBC.
(Image credit: Nan Zhong)
Source: neatorama