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They said I only got into Cornell because of affirmative action
High school classmates said Austin Starks only got into Cornell because of affirmative action. This is the record after they let him in.
He entered as pre-med and started powerlifting. He could not bench two plates at first, then became one of the best powerlifters at Cornell and in the Ivy League, won the Ivy League Championship, and squatted 455 pounds. Junior year he decided he did not want to be a doctor, switched to computational biology, took intro computing in Python, and spent that summer doing computational biology research at Princeton.
Carnegie Mellon then paid him to get a master's in software engineering on a full ride. US News ranks Carnegie Mellon number one for graduate computer science, tied with MIT and Stanford. In a few weeks he starts at Figma, at least three hundred thousand dollars a year on levels.fyi. NexusTrade, the AI trading platform he built alone, is over 1.6 million lines of code across sixteen thousand commits, written at night after work.
Figures are as of September 2026. The Figma number is the company range on levels.fyi, not an individual offer. Oscar Health and Coinbase are not in this cut.
Transcript
0:00A lot of my high school classmates said I only got into Cornell because of affirmative action.
0:04So this is what I did after they let me in.
0:06I entered Cornell as a pre-med student, and I was introduced to powerlifting.
0:10Even though I initially could not bench two plates, I quickly became stronger, and ended up becoming one of the best powerlifters at Cornell, and one of the best in the Ivy League.
0:19Let me say that again.
0:21I became one of the best powerlifters at Cornell, and one of the best in the Ivy League.
0:25I won the Ivy League Championship.
0:27And my max squat is four hundred and fifty five pounds.
0:32But my junior year I decided I did not want to go to medical school.
0:35I did not want to be a doctor.
0:37So I switched to computational biology and took my first computer science class, intro computing in Python.
0:43I fell in love.
0:44That summer I did computational biology research at Princeton.
0:47Then Carnegie Mellon paid me to get a master's in software engineering.
0:51I went there on a full ride.
0:52US News ranks Carnegie Mellon number one in the country for graduate computer science, tied with MIT and Stanford.
1:00In a few weeks I start at Figma, where I'll make at least three hundred thousand dollars a year.
1:04And I built NexusTrade entirely by myself, which is over one point six million lines of code across sixteen thousand commits, and I wrote almost all of it at night after work.
1:14That's the kid my classmates said only got in because of affirmative action.
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