Dumbest Things You've Seen On College Applications (School Stories r/AskReddit)

College University admissions officers of reddit what's the dumbest thing you've seen on an application or essay I am NOT an applicant I am an applique an I'm using this the last time this question was asked about admissions essays I shared the story of my favorite English teacher marking provincial exams and coming across some gem students quoting because lazy my favorite teacher in high school used to grade provincial English exams basically they put you in a room and you write essays out of five all day you have to do one paper every five ten minutes and you're supposed to do it an absolutely stone-cold silence he's in the middle of grading a pretty bless a paper and he can just sense the guy beside him losing his crab he's practically convulsing he's trying so hard not to laugh he cracks and his openly howling and people start to get up and gather around to see what's funny to the kid ended every single sentence in exclamation marks we went to the mall today the mall was really packed we went to buy shoes the kind I wanted went there I was sad but then I bought another pair of shoes there okay I like my new shoes who does that I reviewed applications for fellowships at a university hospital one application letter was written in text speak including emoticons in defense of this doctor she was an international applicant and online chatting was probably how she learned English I had a student tell me she was applying because it was her dream to study under Professor Emeritus but she had read all of his papers and follow a profile Meritus work for years she asked me if he preferred to be addressed as Doctor emeritus oh my god I thought you were using that as a fake name until I read the post again that's hilarious my aunt works in College Admissions and complains about the kids who attach bribe money usually a $5 or a $20 sometimes jokingly sometimes serious as she said she rejects those applications without looking at them she also complains about the helicopter parents who call in and want exact detail on their kids admission status how well the application looked what they thought of the essay etc good god I thought that the bribe money thing was only on AP tests I work with adults with special needs and we had one person participating in the program who had what we would have referred to as Asperger's syndrome nice guy very sharp he was writing an essay for admission and he asked me to read it over he started it with I am qualified to be a part of your institution because I survived I was ready to wrote in my eyes but I read on and Daeng this kid rolled for once for every stat urine character creation he'd been hit by a car electrocuted nearly drowned and been hospitalized six or seven times for various infections over the years he wasn't stupid and his family weren't monsters he was just possessed of a preternatural ability to attract bad events and then to survive them the universe had tried very very hard to kill this kid and he somehow managed to dodge the overwhelming majority of it I told him not to change a word he got him it's like you want your school to be the epicenter for the apocalypse iishe in my 10th year working professionally in college admissions the dumbest thing is the sheer number of parents who blatantly admit out loud in actual words to us that they are the ones filling out their students college admissions and scholarship applications no shame or even a hint that there might be something wrong with this I've seen two essays written by parents not just essays where you could tell from the writing that it was written by an adult but essays by mothers written in first person about their sons needless to say neither gotten and one probably would have otherwise since he had the grades so a few days ago someone from the CSU system came to my high school to talk about essays one example was a girl who apparently decided her topic was on a Korean boy band or more specifically how obsessed she was with it she pulled all-nighters to make some fan website at became popular to the point of the band noticing went as far as to learn Korean because screw English translations and said that despite seeming really crazy it was proof that she was very dedicated to whatever she did the admission guy said he approved her this sounds crazy but it's real impressive my friend learned fluent Mandarin solely because she has a huge Chinese boy fetish and now she's getting dong left and right in China this may not be exactly what you're looking for but I used to intern in the admissions office there was a policy that if you didn't bring an AC t-scores you had to take a placement test not an entrance exam just a placement test Community College if you did bring an AC t-- scores and had at least a 12 in each section for those unfamiliar highest possible score is 36 very rare you could start out in standard classes below that you had to take the placement test and potentially take remedial courses this girl comes in one day and plops down her application and everything I run through it all and inform her she'll have to take the placement test but I thought if I brought in my AC T scores I wouldn't have to take the placement test you don't have to take the placement test if you score a 12 or above in each section well I didn't really look at it what did I make look again to make sure I read it right overall six oh is that bad it means you have to take the placement test here are the forms you need I used to be an administrator in an admissions office and would read applications before passing them on to the people who make the actual decisions my favorites included someone's personal statement that said I think so far outside of the box there is no box the person that included a copy of their pleasure boat driving license the Prince of maths who included a 45 minutes DVD of himself solving equations interspersed with dance routines the guy that submitted his personal statement showing the track changes including comments such as they can never say no to you and summon the tiger within and the many many people who offered me bright despite explaining until I was blue in the face that I had no effect on the decision and also it was illegal the Prince of maths who included a 45-minute DVD of himself solving equations interspersed with dance routines head that might be YouTube gold I worked at a university that did not require admissions essays unless they were specifically asked for this meant you were wait-listed for example or something whirring stood out on your application the rest of the essays were only read by the data-entry crew one student had an extremely large amount of absences in his/her high school career and was asked to explain why the student said he/she had an intense fear of worms and because he/she walked to school was unable to attend when it had recently reigned as the sidewalks would be covered in worms it is an unusual explanation but specific phobia can cause irrational avoidance behavior as an admission counselor I see a lot of dumb essays I get more frustrated but dumb emails asking questions that are easily answered on the website do you have a nursing program number no we don't but the essays that most people are referencing here are not dumb but memorable which are the ones that get you accepted compelling essays even about complex theft cilantro beans arrests once I read an essay about a student's arrest the actual arrest not the crime are the ones that get acceptance letters do you realize how many thousands of essays we read each year if it sticks out wiill advocate for you when it comes to committee time I processed applications for a grad school admissions office when I first started working at my university and until a few years ago a lot of paper application materials were still being mailed in so I opened some doozies one math PhD applicants assay literally said I like math in red crayon I think he figured his 4.0 GPA and awesome gray quiet school was all he needed he didn't get in to international applicants sent in a photo of them conducting a military band in a chicken suit I have no clue why it went up on the wall of WTF in our office three my favorite a disturbed paranoid woman applied to PhD in psychology in person by coming to the admissions office and hand filling out one of the rare few paper applications we still had lying around then promptly pulled a letter from a recommender form her pocket that was on us folded a piece of paper not in a sealed envelope or anything we explained to her it's customary for such documents to be in a sealed envelope with signature across the seal to show it hasn't hasn't been interfered with by the applicant she demanded an envelope which she shoved the lettering licked seals then wrote her name across the scene she came by a handful of times after that to hand-deliver documents for her application as she didn't trust a US Postal Service and said it would deliberately lose her letters because the government doesn't want people of her race to get higher education my favorite was when a letter of recommendation arrived for her this time in the mail in a sealed envelope sent by the recommender himself it said and I quote the only way X should be admitted to the gradual program in psychology as a patient the recommender was a pastor and when she finally received her inevitable rejection from the psych program she mailed the graduate school an itemized bill for her application and gray fees gasps for all her trips to the University and stamps for things she never mailed us through the racist USPS because she wanted us to reimburse her the application asked about residency status that says international US citizen permanent resident the applicant checked visa and wrote in MasterCard next to it they knew what they were doing the reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other University I have always wanted to go there as I have felt that it is not just another college but is a university with something definite to offer then too I would like to go to the same College as my father to be a Harvard man is an enviable distinction and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain the 23rd of April 1935 John F Kennedy my friend wrote one about how he invented penicillin he got accepted crap I should write one about how I invented in our essay qualifications or certifications I'm ordained and can marry people in Minnesota turns out he wasn't fricking with us seen a few years back when I was still working for admissions I got into my selective college based on my essay and a CT score because my HS grades were crap anyway my essay was called romancing the secretary and it was about all the school secretaries I knew growing up and going through school I was a weird kid with a host of issues so I spent a lot of time in the school offices getting to know the secretaries if they were lovely women who got to know me and protected me from bullies and some of the teachers who hated me whenever I couldn't deal with class or was having a bad time I'd go see the secretaries and they'd cheer me up excuse me from class and make me feel like a valued human being instead of like a worthless piece of crap I didn't really have friends in high school if I had the secretaries and also the janitors and they protected me and kept me sane they were the only people to ever acknowledge my birthday's or even sign my ebooks I met the guy who read my essay and he said it made him cry cause he was the weird kid once - he said he put my application on the top of the stack and knew that I had to go to that college because he knew I would find my people there and sure enough I did my essay was so awful that my principal got mad at me for disrespecting the school you have to post it now I had a student who never had their application matched up with their other materials test scores transcripts etc because the social security numbers didn't match that's because their mother had filled out the application and written in her SSN instead I work in admissions at an online college we work in a physical office and you'd better believe we get plenty of crazy things funneling through one of my favorites was an application we received for a 27 ish year old student who was applying for a graduate degree she had worked in her field for several years with a bachelor's a few weeks after receiving this application we started getting calls from her mother demanding day-day progress reports on the status of the application helicopter parents are crazy we also get plenty of people who opt to write things such as is this really necessary and I don't have time for this with my busy work schedule where they are supposed to attach a resume needless to say if you don't have time to update your own dang resume you probably don't have time to take on a full college workload the writing prompt for my top choice college when I applied was what would you do with an industrial-sized jar of mustard one of my high school friends wrote about how corrupted the UC admissions offices it was hilarious but the arguments he made were actually fair and thought-provoking he got into Berkeley I got accepted into Cornell University by writing an essay about how much I hate cilantro dang you must really hate cilantro I apparently dropped several curse words in a scholarship essay the award covered about 50% of tuition every semester I was accepted and was later told while some of the reviewers were offended we appreciated your honesty always proofread your I definitely online submitted an essay to a prof where I forgot to change the file name from Douglasville crap Lynette doc oh well my sister wrote her MIT essay about how she games a large department stores pricing inconsistencies to turn a profit to buy on sale return at regular price etc she had a pretty complicated system going she essentially wrote about how she steals from department stores she got him she also discussed the ethics of it and at the time we were pretty poor but yet for my assay for the University of Chicago I explained that I really didn't feel like writing an essay about anything they asked me to write about and so I was just going to write short answers instead I then wrote really sarcastic answers to each of them and didn't even answer one I got in that's genius I could see how they would love it though if it were well done basically as long as you're a good writer and it's well done you can do whatever but it's a big risk and I'm not that clever or skilled of a writer so I've been sticking to the prompts and playing it safe let's see where I get in I go to rice and my entire common app essay was about Lisa Simpson you have been visited by the Lord of the good boys comment who's a good boy to instantly become part of the good 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Channel: Updoot Everything

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Id: t11xgB-AXQY

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019