Faux Cardinal
This story is awesome. Stanford University has caught a girl who's been pretending to be a student at the school for the last eight months.
The girl, named Azia Kim, showed up on campus the day before freshman orientation this school year, and told two freshmen she was a freshman having temporary housing problems due to some kind of administrative snafu and that she didn't like the roommate she'd been assigned, and could she crash in their room or in the dorm lounge for two quarters. They said yes.
The next quarter, Kim moved into the Asian-themed dorm Okada (.pdf) when someone else's roommate went abroad. Since Kim never had a key to the room or a valid Stanford ID, she would always leave the window to her room open, and climb in over the dumpster. Her roommate never noticed because she'd basically moved into her boyfriend's room that semester, but just figured Kim liked fresh air. That is so college.
After the jump: faking classes, breaking into people's email accounts, and the hilarious Stanford comment boards!
Kim told everyone she was a sophomore majoring in human biology, to the extent of pretending to study for exams with others in her dorm. Based on our perusal of the comments to the Stanford Daily piece, it sounded like she had a number of friends, and kept Xanga and MySpace sites (which have since been taken down) about how awesome life at Stanford was.
The whole thing came to a head last week, when a suspicious RA finally figured out that Kim wasn't supposed to be in the dorm. It turns out that when questions had previously been raised, Kim had broken into her roommate's email account, deleted emails from the Housing Office asking for an explanation, and sent fake emails in response saying everything was cool.
The school confronted Kim about this, who then pretended to move out of the room, but school officials later found all her clothes stuffed in the roommate's closet. They finally ended up putting Kim in a cab heading to her uncle's house in San Jose a few days ago, at 2 a.m..
No one's talked to Kim, but people are, of course, speculating that maybe she felt a lot of pressure to get into Stanford when she was in school and it kind of escalated out of control. She apparently went to a pretty competitive high school in Southern California.
There's some excellent commentary about this article in the Stanford Daily -- one commenter's like, "I think Stanford should admit her. She is obviously smarter than the people who she convinced to board her for 8 months," "She didn't go to Cal because it blows," I'm a current student in Kimball, and what pisses me off the most is that she got free food. That stuff is money!", and our personal favorite: "I think she should apply to Brown."