Bill Gates Was Accepted Into Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. He Says He Treated Each Application Like a 'Performance.' Gates said that his strategy for college applications was to experiment with his "persona" while applying to each school.

^{This article originally appeared on Business Insider.}

Bill Gates is a well-known Harvard dropout, but his applications to Ivy League universities as a teen are just as interesting as his decision not to finish his degree.

In his memoir, "Source Code: My Beginnings," Gates wrote about his college application process as a teenager uncertain of his career path. His varying interests led him to take an unconventional approach with each university he applied to.

Gates said that when it came to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, he experimented with his "persona" while applying to each school. After joining a drama club as a hobby outside programming, acting made him feel free and more confident, he said.

"As I learned in drama class, each was a performance — one actor, three characters," he wrote.

Gates took on a new character for each application. He expressed interest in different areas of study at each of the three schools, but he included his real experiences to back up his choices, he said.

He told Princeton he wanted to be a software engineer, emphasizing his coding experience and math grades. On his Yale application, he said he wanted to work for the government or become a lawyer.

Gates spent time working as a page for the House of Representatives during his high school years. He said a career in politics was a possible "backup plan" if computers didn't take off.

To Harvard, Gates emphasized his background in computers — within 600 words, he said — and wrote about his time as a programming teacher being a particularly hard job. The end of his essay, however, was a departure from the extracurriculars he'd listed.

He wrote: "Work with the computer has proved to be a great opportunity to have a lot of fun, earn some money, and learn a lot. However, I do not plan to continue concentrating in this field. Right now I am most interested in business or law."

As for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gates said he blew off his summer interview at the exclusive science, technology, and engineering university. He said he didn't want to be "a math nerd surrounded by other math nerds," so he played pinball instead of showing up.

Eventually, he was accepted into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Gates chose Harvard and later dropped out to focus on his budding company, Microsoft.