Gates applied only to three colleges his senior year—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—and he took different approaches to each. “I was born to apply for college,” he boasted, fully aware of his ability to ace meritocratic processes. For Yale he cast himself as an aspiring political type and emphasized a monthlong summer internship he had done in Congress. For Princeton, he focused only on his desire to be a computer engineer. And for Harvard, he said his passion was math. He had also considered MIT, but at the last moment blew off the interview to play pinball. He was accepted to all three and
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