‘Weilin Xin’ Gets into Stanford GSB: An Admitify Case Study

The following Admitify case study was an actual client who Paul Bodine helped gain admission to Stanford GSB and Chicago Booth. He was wait-listed at HBS, Wharton, MIT, and Haas. Proper names have been changed to protect his privacy.

Weilin was a 29-year-old senior software engineer at Amazon. He grew up in Wuhan, China, the son of two doctors. He earned his BS in Electronic Engineering from Peking University where he earned a 3.74 GPA (top 10%). He was on the executive board of two student technology associations and on the organizing committee of an exchange program between China and Germany, a delegate to a technology conference in Japan, and a member of the organizing committee for a nonprofit that teaches poor Chinese students in far western China. At Peking U. he was also a machine-learning research intern at an Apple R&D center in China. After graduating from Peking U., Weilin began a PhD in computer science — with a specialization in voice recognition and machine learning — at Carnegie Mellon where he co-wrote 5 scientific articles for prominent peer-reviewed scientific journals. While pursuing his PhD he deepened his research into voice recognition and machine learning at Apple R&D in Silicon Valley. During his rare 27-month internship at Apple he co-founded an internal effort to use cutting-edge machine learning technology to accurately detect the likelihood that callers to suicide hotlines intended to harm themselves, thereby saving several lives. While preparing his dissertation research during his third year at CMU he followed his instincts and heart and co-founded, with a Silicon Valley engineer, a startup, ‘Voicify’, in the voice recognition space. Sixteen months after starting his company he sold it to Baidu for many millions of dollars. That same month Weilin joined Amazon’s Alexa/Echo team as an engineer. He earned two major promotions in only 3 years, filed 6 US patents and now manages two Amazon interns. His GMAT score was 760 (Q51, V41). Weilin’s post-MBA goal was to start his own AI company in the simultaneous translation space. Weilin was a U.S. permanent resident and his interests were soccer, table tennis, foosball, and reading. He was targeting H/S/W.

His biggest challenges were his relative lack of community leadership or extracurricular activity, his relative lack of leadership (he’d managed only interns briefly) and business experience relative to his age (29 years old but only 4 years of full-time work experience), his incomplete PhD (he left in his third, after already passing his qualifying exam), his English skills (he moved to the U.S. at age 22), and age (at 29 he was mildly older than the median at his three target schools). His biggest challenge of all perhaps was simply that, as a Chinese male engineer, he was in a very competitive applicant pool.

Our strategy was threefold: (1) to differentiate Weilin by humanizing him relative to his many talented peers by sharing the neglect he’d felt as an only child of two parents who worked long hours, then connecting his parents’ sense of career mission to Weilin’s own sense of mission toward his post-MBA goals; (2) to build up his lack of people-management experience by emphasizing the pattern of entrepreneurial leadership, starting from a college nonprofit project then his workplace’s personal project then the startup he sold; and (3) compensating for his lack of community leadership by emphasizing the social impact of his pre-MBA career and most-MBA goals.

Weilin was admitted to Stanford GSB and Chicago Booth (with $40,000 in scholarships). He was waitlisted at HBS, Wharton, MIT, and Haas. After he chose GSB, he withdrew from the other schools’ waitlists. He wrote me happily: “Thank you very much for helping me realize my dream!!!”