- Bill Gates applied to Ivy League schools using different personas and interests.
- Gates experimented with different career paths in his letter, including politics.
- He was accepted to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, ultimately choosing Harvard before dropping out.
Bill Gates is a well-known Harvard dropout, but his applications to Ivy League universities as a teen are just as interesting as his decision not to finish his degree.
In his memoir, "Source Code: My Beginnings," Gates wrote about his college application process as a teenager uncertain of his career path. His varying interests led him to take an unconventional approach with each university he applied to.
When it came to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, Gates said he "experimented with my persona" while applying to each school. After joining a drama club as a hobby outside programming, he said acting made him feel free and more confident.
"As I learned in drama class, each was a performance — one actor, three characters," he wrote.
Gates took on a new character for each application. He expressed interest in different areas of study to all three schools, but Gates said he included his real experiences to back up his choices.
He told Princeton he wanted to be a software engineer. To them, Gates emphasized his coding experience and math grades. On his Yale application, he said he wanted to work for the government or become a lawyer.
Gates spent time working as a page for the House of Representatives during his high school years. He said a career in politics was a possible "backup plan" if computers didn't take off.
To Harvard, Gates emphasized his background in computers — within 600 words, he said — and wrote about his time as a programming teacher being a particularly hard job. However, the end of his essay was a departure from the extracurriculars he'd listed.
He wrote: "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 do not plan to continue concentrating in this field. Right now I am most interested in business or law."
As for MIT, Gates said he blew off his summer interview at the exclusive science, technology, and engineering university. He said he didn't want to be "a math nerd surrounded by other math nerds," so Gates played pinball instead of showing up.
Eventually, he was accepted into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Gates chose Harvard and later dropped out to focus on his budding company, Microsoft.
