The Most Pretentious College Applications Ever

admissions officers sa coaches have read it what was the most pretentious application you've ever seen not pretentious but i had a chinese student right in their application i hardly ever waste water paper or rice or presumably he was conflating economics the degree subject being applied for with being economical he also said that he had found a phone and had returned it to the owner even though he was russian a whole essay about how it had long been her dream to study at the prestigious university of leicester and all the incredible gifts life would bestow on her for living her dream in an application for a university that was not leicester my best friend was salutatorian of her class of 600 she only applied to one college and it was an ivy league she is an upper middle class white girl who plays a harp she wrote her college essay on being a jet setter it pains me to say that she was completely shocked when she got flat out rejected i know a guy like this applied to all ivy league schools got into none of them and put in a last-minute application to the state university which is a dang good school anyway at least with this case it helped deflate his ego and he's super cool now i worked in a very religious private schools admissions department for a few weeks filing applications the parents had to write a letter about their child and why the school would suit them i'll always remember the man who wrote three pages about how successful a businessman he was how he owned several businesses how good he was at the school's main sport and then attached a large check to the last page not a word about the kid what i remember most the rejection letter from the principal with a thinly veiled insinuation that bribery was immoral and not acceptable at this school bribery is not accepted here your son is denied and thank you for your generous donation it will go toward these worthy causes i got to interview some students for a special program in my undergrad it was highly competitive and lots of people wanted it young woman comes in i offer her a seat i'd prefer to stand this won't take long it won't no my dad is the dean of one of the colleges and my mom is one of the professors who established this program i'm getting in i emphasized that she really should take a seat she refused again so i say hey this interview me approving you is part of the process you have to do well in this to get in you'll say i did well or my parents will make life heck for you her parents had zero impact on anything in my life and i told her as much after articulating this to her i said i'm going to give you a chance to walk out the door and restart this interview fresh start she lost it and yelled at me for like five minutes i filled out the interview sheet with direct quotes from her tantrum she didn't get in a few days after decisions were made i got an email from her father who was in fact a dean he asked me to come in and have a chat with him it was totally a request i went to talk to him when i went to see him he had a copy of the interview sheet where i had several direct quotes from his daughter some of the quotes were awful and directed at me my family and basically everything she could hit on he apologized profusely for his daughter and asked if she could redo the interview he was leaning on me a bit at this point i told him that choices had already been made and she was not selected the whole thing was mind-blowing she was so entitled not an admissions officer but i was part of an admissions committee when i served as faculty at a wonderful university one admissions essay compared his act of applying to the law school with that of a palestinian child facing oppression the closing line was bravery comes in many forms a palestinian child picking up a stone against illegal occupation and me writing this essay both are comparable still haven't forgotten it maybe he didn't actually want to go to your school and his family was forcing him to apply nobody can sabotage an essay more effectively than that i went to space camp on a scholarship program after writing an essay to get in one of the kids in my group who time and time again proved he wasn't smart enough to write his own essay bragged about how his mother wrote his and he didn't even want to be there i messed up on both their parts to take away an opportunity from someone who actually wanted to go i wasn't exactly a coach but in my junior year of high school we peer reviewed each other's essays and the guy i got paired with who was sending this to mit made the assertion that i am an asset to your institution for when i am wildly successful i will be sending money back to the school through charitable donations i will also give your school incredible amount of publicity when i am interviewed by the press he didn't get in mit really lost out on all that free publicity doesn't quite answer your question but we recently had someone we had rejected for our most competitive course email us he said that he regretted to inform us that he was unable to accept our rejection and would see us on the first day of the course very soon at least he had a sense of humor i used to do a little recruitment from time to time for a large cruise line based in the uk i once had an application through where the applicant cv was literally him asking himself questions and then proceeding to answer them it read something like this so you're probably thinking who is this guy well i'm a hard-working individual who isn't afraid to go above and beyond why go above and beyond you say well i believe that customer always comes first etc you get the idea not an admissions officer but i have evaluated placement essays for first year writing first semester second semester or in rare cases test it out completely i remember reading one about how selfies were important because of such reasons as so people can know where you are and if you travel you can use them to take pictures of monuments and landmarks this student essentially though i'm not sure intentionally made the argument that every picture that is taken has to be a selfie and if they weren't in the picture it wasn't worth anything i put them in first semester yikes i've read kind of good essays about selfies in the past rich people would pay a lot of money to have paintings done of themselves but now anybody can admire a picture of themselves and documenting when you feel good about yourself is good for your self-esteem that's where i thought you were going with this i used to help out with auditions for the acting program at my school and one girl came in with a scented resume before she walked in the head of acting was like during the interview do not mention the resume she was not a good actor the scented resume was clearly something she thought was cute and charming enough to score her some personality points nope i used to tutor at uni and helped occasionally with my two teas applications one thing i always encouraged them to do was to mention their aspirations after graduating and to mention why specifically this university one kid who'd been a pretentious butt the whole time actually wrote in his essay that he didn't really care about the academic part because his dad was just going to give him a job and he graduated anyways he chose the unit he was applying to based on how impressive they sounded and how good the party life was i kept in touch with his sister she was super smart and studied the same subjects as me so i helped her out with career advice etc later on she dropped into conversation later with a noticeable bit of glee that her brother was going through a challenging patch because his father informed him that no daddy was not going to give him a free ride into a cushy job and did expect him to get a real job the sister is definitely the smart one but especially for staying in touch i've tried to help various younger workers in my field but it's amazing how many just completely fail to realize how important networking is but not so much in the i know a guy who's gonna give me a sweet job but more in the here's someone who has been where i am and i can use the advice i was a medical school interview coach earning some extra money through med school some applicants were great others were what you'd expect from kids whose parents are paying a tutor to teach them how to act normal our med school interviews are easy to pass but difficult to do well in they involve generic questions like your passion or interests ethical scenarios decision making questions knowledge of healthcare topics etc there have been memorable answers to mock questions in terms of pretentious i asked one guy what his hobbies were and he said he loved armani suits and buying expensive coffee blends not a great answer but what killed it was that he began describing the smoothness of the bean and licking and smacking his lips together in wet squelching noises another applicant's dad was a successful surgeon so he argued in his answers i basically already know how to be a doctor through osmosis he failed the entrance exam seven times and his dad opened a lot of doors for him getting him research editor positions for his cv etc there were complex family dynamics he would say really inappropriate things like when i'm a doctor i can buy and sell you and all your friends all i have to do is pass this stupid exam and interview and my dad will get me a spot in the training program you'll be struggling for years he'd then flip to complaining for half an hour about how his sister gets treated like a princess and call me at 10 pm just to talk i declined further sessions but was pretty sympathetic to be honest whenever his dad called to arrange sessions and materials he was very pejorative toward his son i had trouble hearing him during one of the phone calls because of background noise until he stepped outside later found out that he had been calling me a tutor during his son's graduation ceremony he missed his son going on stage to receive his diploma because he was arranging a booking time with me it placed a lot of his son's defensive behavior in context and no he has not been accepted into a med school that was two years ago and he emailed only a few weeks ago to request access to my google drive to brush up on some things i granted it because when your answer to her conflicts in teamwork question is i'd tell them i'm sorry that they're wrong no amount of microsoft word documents will change your performance it's weird to think about this kid as a person who has never had an original thoughts in his head or is too scared to admit to having an original thoughts in his head that perhaps he could do anything else but be a doctor for me it's the students that disparage the very ones that provide their application support the kids that bash their coaches for not starting them for x games or complain about their teachers who give them too much homework meanwhile the wrecks and coaches are writing about how great this kid is never a good look yeah coach holder put me in fourth quarter we would have been state champions no doubt no doubt in my mind obligatory not an admissions officer but my senior year of high school we read our college admissions essays for our english classes one student's broad topic was admirable he wrote about agism and that it was sad that it stopped people from doing the things they loved young people shouldn't it old people should rollerblade stuff like that however the actual bulk of the essay was him describing how much he loved to play with stuffed turtles he got into a highly competitive university with that essay but mostly because his parents worked there letters simply said something along the lines of let me an ex-hall named after grandpa he donated a crap ton of money so this letter means nothing he was right got right in go to love pay to play college bribery scandal but legal i'm a college admissions consultant and the worst one i've read was a full me to essay about how much the applicant loved college admissions and writing admissions essays it was arrogant and aloof throughout but the kicker was when the student called herself an elite applicant with outstanding admissions essay skills right there in the essay i felt sorry for her because it felt like the stress of the process had given her a stockholm syndrome obsession with it i tried to bring her back to reality gently but she wasn't having it she didn't get in shock had pikachu jpg reminds me of the wpst exam i had to take in college the prompt was about what kind of skills i wish i had i was halfway tempted to write a snark response of wishing i was better at writing essays based around stupid prompts but since this test determined my graduation i didn't want to risk seeing if the grader had a sense of humor obligatory not an admissions counselor but i was a masters student who helped a family friend's high schooler editor college admission essay the prompt was something about the greatest struggle they've experienced that made them who they are her response my greatest struggle in life was that i was too academically advanced for my age and i was not challenged enough in school yikes i was considering making a throwaway but it seems i will be buried enough to not need it i read as an admissions person for a competitive national fellowship that helps students study abroad the last essay i read that day made my job very easy as this person was all over the place bragging about being a religious hippie how his parents were missionaries so he already had a global perspective how he writes the best poetry everyone considers him a leader these were all one sentence and indented as new paragraphs with absolutely zero elaboration the cherry on top his closing was literally saying that he could work in the private sector or government when he graduates and the choice is yours i was like lol okay private sector thanks the choice is yours dead if anyone is reading this looking for advice on what not to do general rules are avoid quotes it is fine to have idols and talk about them big quotes take up valuable space and word count and it's not even your own words better to make a subtle reference to it or talk about the meaning of said quote and why that inspires you show don't tell it is a waste of time saying i went to x4 experience without talking about what you learned from that experience otherwise it's just a meaningless non-comment hobbies don't just put reading it's nothing special to say you read as if it makes you different and links into the above point talk about what genre what you've learned from it and how it will help you going forward in the role this quote thing is kind of getting to me our head of lit in high school drilled it into our heads that every paragraph should have a supporting quote somewhat pretentious or perhaps just plain weird i had an individual offer me money to write an application essay which was about himself he had to have some sort of balls you could write the essay about his massive balls husband of a friend of mine went to a prestigious college for grad school where his father happened to be an alumni and hold some sort of executive position dad not only pulled all kinds of strings to get sun in but he wrote his essay this guy isn't at all ashamed and loves to mention his alma mater in passing conversation this is actually a difficult mom story the student was a nice kid with decent grades so an easy admit but with a very average scholarship i can see from his app that they are very well off and they didn't even file the fafsa which is a telltale sign that they don't need the help so a while after i admit the kid the mom calls me to ask for a higher scholarship i ask her if her son retook the act sat since he submitted he submitted his app the only reason why we'd reconsider a scholarship she says no okay so there's no reason for the scholarship committee akame to review his scholarship then and it's obvious that she's only asking for the bragging rights i'm very nice about it but i make it clear that we're not increasing her kids scholarship she goes off on me telling me that clearly i must not know the quality of private school he goes to which i am very familiar with and that i don't know how much money they have her reasoning was that they are rich so we should give him a better scholarship and then they'll donate money to the college not only did she pull the favorite line do you have any idea who we are but she also tried to bribe me with his family financing a new building on campus direct quote i don't think you understand me here the school where my daughter goes to has a building named for us don't you think my university name needs a new building on campus it was the most bizarre and entitled conversation i've ever had with another human long story short i didn't bump his scholarship and the kid enrolled anyway psychiatric nurse studying for phd didn't know what dementia is having now fully woken up i realize this doesn't really fit the criteria but may fit the spirit of it so have left it up interviewed a locum who applied for a job in a community mental health mh team that specializes in diagnosis and support for people with dementia she was a qualified psychiatric nurse with an advanced degree in studying for a phd her cv was impressively full of achievements and innovative work such as setting up and running a cafe for people with mh problems and had apparently got an award for same she turns up for interview with dog hairs all over her dirty clothes hair and brushed this would not have been an issue apartheid killer if she had actually been able to give a definition of dementia or had known the name of any of the standardized tests every mh professional would know and used at least one she also couldn't tell me any of the medications used to mitigate the effects of dementia although there had been a lot of controversy in the news about the nhs allowing them to be prescribed at that time we didn't employ her another team did however a few months later she was asked for interview again my bad we were very short staffed and there were a couple of us going through the mirrored off cv sent by agencies also the cv showed employment by this other team i go to get her from the waiting room she looks up her face fell and she just said oh no anywho because she now had some experience we interviewed again nope nope nope after the interview i called the other team she had been so awful they decided to never employ agency staff again which was short-sighted of them a lot of agency staff are amazing but you need people who can't hit the ground running and therefore must interview thoroughly i saw an lsat writing prompt that started with the line hitler had a few good ideas really doesn't matter what you say after that it also had absolutely nothing to do with the prompt well he did kill hitler as a senior who has just been rejected from practically every university i applied to this thread is making me feel a bit better m8 your post say you got into berkeley what are you on about lol be happy not me but my wife reviews these on an essay about an impactful event in your life the kid wrote about being born like the actual act of coming into the world not sure how much this qualifies as being pretentious but how much more obvious could it be that one of his parents wrote it and how mundane is your life that you choose birth as the most impactful event and how does this set you apart from any other candidate self i wrote about how anti-intellectual religion was i don't even remember the prompt that was what i was writing about no matter what every other word was a thesaurus drop in jesus freaking christ it was bad it's not about the federal on your head it's about the fedora in your heart part of an honors college at my school one of our essay questions was to pick a word that describes you and why one kid choose literally because as a kid he had the mental acuity to know what the word actually meant so when his mother would tell him not to touch his sister he would touch her clothes instead and other things of that nature it is now a running gag within the group i just want to note that a lot of the advice here for example don't lie don't come off as an entitled crazy person don't be a pose applies to resumes cover letters and job interviews as well having done a lot of interviews and applicant reviews for a very well-known dream job bragging rights company and had my own fair share of reviewing several thousand applications for employees and interns over my career a lot of the suggestions here are totally relatable to nearly any type of institution that you are applying to i reviewed applications for a local state college we didn't need to read essays if the grades were good enough but one time i saw a kid with an 800 sat writing score i had never seen one so i curiously checked their essay their essay was all about getting an 800 on their writing set was reviewing an application and checking the letters of recommendation for any red flags i started reading one letter that was very enthusiastic about the candidate she is incredibly kind and caring she can do no wrong she was made for this profession how do i know all this she's my daughter this girl had her father write her a letter of recommendation made my job real easy that day i saw someone's essay that was littered with idiotic statements like can cook minute rice in 30 seconds probably smarter than your boss fan of causing drama i work in i.t and had to take an interview for a position in my team a guy walked in and looked me dead in the eye and said you don't look like you know enough to give me a job i was shocked at first but then told him politely to sit down and we will see about it he didn't realize that the interviews were being recorded he kept taking like he owned the place and the job was his he didn't give any right answers he told me his father was a politician and he would buy his way into my position if he needed we obviously rejected him but two weeks later he came with a bunch of goons to threaten me and my project in the end the hr and the police were involved to get it sorted and that was the last interview i ever took i coach kids on their essays no i do not write them for them i volunteer with low-income kids at the local high school who could make it into school if they had some guidance they have written about surviving the haitian earthquake living in a shelter living in a car getting up at 4am every morning to get all their siblings ready for school etc you get the idea then i go back to my paying customers who want to write about how their parents spent 10 000 for them to go look at poor people in rwanda or something and now they know there are people who don't have it as good as they do i don't really blame those kids they don't know what they don't know but the discrepancy makes me insane i read personal statements for you cause in the uk and i've read some gems there was a lad who applied for sport science who said we should let him in because he was an in-store uber crumby model and then the child of a celebrity who said we should let them in because they'd done work experience with famous person i live for reading these statements every year if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] so bye for now

Channel: On Tap Studios

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Keywords: pretentious, pretentious people, college application, college application essay, college application advice, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, sub, reddit cringe, memes, comment awards, dankify, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, chill, story, stories, reddit on tap, reddit stories 2021

Id: 71QOYKmqNHE

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021