I'm a YC founder and I dropped out of not-one-of-those colleges (RPI). My cofounder dropped out of high school.
Why not just give it a shot? Find the powerful parts of your story (I'm sure they exist) and share them!
We applied, as GP advocates for, mostly to sharpen our thinking. Just the application process would've been worth the time, even if we had gotten declined immediately. The interview 10x'd that value, then the YC batch itself was another multiple on top of that.
I would definitely count RPI as one of "those" colleges! I guess everyone has a different list, but for me, RPI is in the same category as Rose-Hulman, Olin, Harvey Mudd, etc. Perhaps not Ivy League level in the sense of being a household name, but still known among people in the field.
The "Ivy League" consists of precisely these eight schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.
Honestly I feel like some of these are negative indicators when it comes to engineering cred.
Meanwhile, stellar engineering schools like Caltech, Stanford, and MIT are in a league of their own.
This comment is mostly to complain that using "Ivy League" as a shorthand for prestigious engineering schools is inaccurate.
It’s definitely a great, high caliber school. But it’s not one of the dropout-porn inspiring ones like Stanford/Harvard.
For example, a lot of people drop out of RPI because it’s actually difficult to get good grades there (not why I did it FWIW). That’s not why anyone drops out of Harvard.
Why not just give it a shot? Find the powerful parts of your story (I'm sure they exist) and share them!
We applied, as GP advocates for, mostly to sharpen our thinking. Just the application process would've been worth the time, even if we had gotten declined immediately. The interview 10x'd that value, then the YC batch itself was another multiple on top of that.