Friday, December 17, 2010
How to get into Harvard 101
I kind of admire the kid. I shouldn’t. But I do. Peter: “You see, by fabricating a set of credentials so perfect they were a caricature of pretension, Wheeler managed to hoist Harvard on its own pompous petard.”
But the question is: How many other phony claims get past the admission offices at elite schools? Maybe they aren’t as blatant as Wheeler’s hum-dingers. But think about all the bogus essays about helping the poor, the faux how-I-spent-my-summers-in-African-villages resumes, the perfect transcripts from the perfect schools, etc. I’d love it if it turned out Wheeler made casual claims about family ties to Tuscany – or how he spent a summer starting a goat-cheese farm in Vermont. …
I kind of admire the kid. I shouldn’t. But I do. Peter: “You see, by fabricating a set of credentials so perfect they were a caricature of pretension, Wheeler managed to hoist Harvard on its own pompous petard.”
But the question is: How many other phony claims get past the admission offices at elite schools? Maybe they aren’t as blatant as Wheeler’s hum-dingers. But think about all the bogus essays about helping the poor, the faux how-I-spent-my-summers-in-African-villages resumes, the perfect transcripts from the perfect schools, etc. I’d love it if it turned out Wheeler made casual claims about family ties to Tuscany – or how he spent a summer starting a goat-cheese farm in Vermont. …
