This prodigy from Long Island is traveling to Florida to showcase his skills.
After being turned down by 15 of the 18 institutions he applied to, including all Ivy League schools, Zach Yadegari, 18, who has an outstanding 4.0 GPA and 34 ACT score, committed to the University of Miami on April 30.
In a message to his 45,300 X followers, Yadegari stated, “Update: I officially committed to Umiami.”
Before even stepping foot on a college campus, Roslyn, New York-based computer innovator Yadegari gained over $30 million via his AI calorie-counting app, Cal AI.
Zach Yadegari, a tech pioneer from Long Island, declared on April 30, 2025, his intention to enroll at the University of Miami.
Launched in 2024, the app lets users take pictures of their food to track how many calories they consume each day.
Despite his great academic and financial accomplishments, the future Hurricane had a difficult application procedure.
All eight Ivy League universities, along with MIT, Stanford, Washington University, Duke, USC, the University of Virginia, NYU, and Vanderbilt, sent him rejection letters, Yadegari disclosed in March.
Zach Yadegari
On October 16, 2024, the University of Miami campus in Coral Gables, Florida. Mizioznikov, Felix – stock.adobe.com
Despite his academic achievements and commercial success, Zach Yadegari revealed a list of the 15 universities that turned him down.
The tech whiz speculated that he might not have met the requirements that colleges had for prospective pupils.
He told Fox News, “I believe that college admissions tries to put students in this framework, a very tight box, that makes it hard for students with extracurricular accomplishments, like an entrepreneur, to really stand out.”
Yadegari claimed that he had missed “a lot of social events” in the previous years and that was why he wanted to attend college.
“I want to hang out with other 18-year-olds now that I’m eighteen.” I don’t want to enter the business sector right away,” he continued.
His application was only accepted by the University of Texas, Georgia Tech, and the University of Miami.
In April, Yadegari told The Post, “I didn’t expect to be accepted to all of these colleges, but I did expect to be accepted to at least a couple of the top schools I was applying to.” “I believe that entrepreneurial achievements might not be given the credit they deserve.”
The teenager, who started coding at the age of seven and had his first app on the Apple App Store at the age of twelve, claimed that it wasn’t until he was turned down by Stanford that he started to feel the consequences of his circumstances.
Yadegari previously told The Post, “I had hope for Stanford, but when I opened their rejection letter, all of the previous rejections just flooded in and really hit me at once.”
Yadegari contrasted his life with that of other prosperous businesspeople who did not require a college degree.
After the 15 universities that rejected Zach Yadegari were made public, his personal essay was published on X.
According to @zach_yadegari/X, Yadegari is expected to graduate in 2029.
“I had unintentionally committed myself to another set of expectations by turning off the university route: the prototypical dropout founder. In a personal essay, he stated, “I was guided by mentors and venture capitalists rather than teachers in a direction that was still not mine.”
I discovered that attending college is more than just a necessary step in life. It serves as a means of elevating the job that I have consistently done. He said, “I want to learn from people in this next chapter, not just from computers or textbooks, both professors and students.”
Also Read –
