This kind of shit really gets my imposter syndrome up. I got Direct Admission at UW back in the day, and I'm 1000% aware that it was a purely geographic decision. I was the only person in my cohort from that part of the state, and I hadn't touched code before in any real meaningful way (my school didn't have CS classes and I hadn't bothered to pursue it in my own time, not that I was lacking the opportunity to do so).

To be fair to myself against this kid, at least back in my day, UW CS DA was almost exclusively for in-state students, it is a state school after all, but I remember in one of the DA meetings having this guy from Bellevue sitting next to me lean over and say "It's funny to think, I bet there are people here who have never even coded before". And then in CS 142, when people I had been studying with who still had to fight to get into the program found out I was already in, the change in the way they treated me was, acute, for lack of a better word. In a lot of ways, that first year just sucked.

The moral of the story years later, knowing people who fought and got into the program, fought and failed, decided not to fight, transferred to continue the fight, none of this stuff actually matters at all. I know people who got a degree from community college who are successful developers, I know people with 4 year CS degrees who are Fish Mongers at Whole Foods.

Getting rejected sucks, I was rejected from some of my "safety schools", I was rejected from every internship I applied to in college, I was rejected from more jobs than my friends would believe. I think the biggest mistake I ever made in my life was internalizing that any of it mattered or said anything about me as a person. The world is too big, too busy, and too random to attribute 99% of it to anything except "bad luck".