My daughter is a high school senior for a couple more weeks so she has recently been through the whole college application process. She and my wife made a trip last month to go look at the insightful institutions that had accepted her and while in the area they stopped by one of the schools that had put her on the waiting list. Unbeknownst to them they managed to time it so that they arrived on the day the school was welcoming newly accepted students. My understanding is their presence led to an awkward conversation with the people in the admissions office who must have been thinking: “what are you doing here?”.
But apparently not everyone is intimidated by not being invited to attend college according to this story in this mornings San Jose Mercury News:
An 18-year-old Fullerton woman spent the last eight months posing as a biology major, buying textbooks, sneaking into meals, even moving into a dorm with an unsuspecting roommate.
Because she never had a Stanford ID or a school-issued dorm key, she got in and out of her dorm by climbing through the first-floor window.
Her story started unraveling this month, and now the university – and her stunned circle of friends and dorm mates – are looking back on how a woman described as a sweet, bespectacled student could have pulled off such a ruse.
University officials ordered the woman off campus Monday but are saying little about their investigation of Azia Kim, identified in Thursday’s edition of the Stanford Daily newspaper.
“I thought she was a normal student,” said Michael Ngo, who lived in her 94-person residence hall. “She looked normal. She had glasses. I often saw her studying.”
Without a key to the residence halls, Kim routinely entered her dorm room by climbing through its first-floor window.
“She convinced her roommate that she needed to keep the window open,” Haber said, laughing. “Sometimes, her roommate would hop through the window, too, like when she’d forget her key.”
Stanford students say the pastoral, sun-kissed campus, with a low crime rate, engenders a feeling of trust and openness.
Kim made herself at home, blending in with other studious Asian-American youth, students said. Perhaps she took too literally the invitation on a flowery sign outside the door of her resident adviser’s room: “My house is your house.”
Her Stanford vacation could cost $44,000, based on the daily $175 fee charged by the university for unauthorized visitors. That’s the same price as an official education, but without the college credit.
