The Cold Email

Three of the biggest changes in my life all stemmed, in part, from cold outreach. Originally I was waitlisted at Carnegie Mellon. Getting waitlisted is like, being the first loser: you’re good enough to be in the topic of conversation, but they make it clear that you’re not good enough to actually get accepted. My dad had me next day air an additional essay about what I was working on at the time (I had built Good-Tutorials, which was the largest tutorial website on the planet, so that was something different). I also included a bunch of other material and things about me and my senior year. I thought doing all of this was pretty silly and a waste of time — didn’t I mention this all before? — but my dad kept saying it wouldn’t hurt to really make it clear I wanted to get into the school. I got in shortly thereafter. Didn’t realize it at the time, but CMU clears something like 1%-10% off the waitlist, so it was indeed more rare than I had realized. Guess it did make sense to reach out…