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It’s Not Exactly Lying

by Patricia Marx
May/June 2007

Illustration by Tim Bower

Harvard received 22,955 applicants seeking to enter the class of 2011. A record-breaking 20,897 (91%) were turned down. How does anyone beat these odds? Not by directing an Academy-Award-winning short about your autistic brother or by building patisseries for poor people in Haiti or by discovering a lost play of Aeschylus and turning it into a wall hanging: Everyone does that. Like a good piece of luggage, a candidate applying to college must stand out, but not so much that authorities become suspicious about what’s inside.

And so, a senior whose hair was blonde dyed it black and wore hoop earrings to her college interviews, thinking it made her look Hispanic. Another girl, allowed to adopt a new name when she was confirmed by the Catholic church, had the foresight to choose Erin Running Deer Maureen O’Malley. A boy whose last name was Brown legally changed his first name to Jamal and then declined to answer the question about race. (Yale accepted a Taliban spokesman to its freshman class last year, but in light of all the consequent hoo-ha, I don’t advise checking the “Taliban” box on your college application form.)

Having your parents donate a dormitory works swell, but there are more inventive ways to use their money. One trust-fund guy I know opened an African orphanage in his daughter’s name that she then falsely claimed to have founded and managed. A man I sat next to at a dinner party unabashedly told me he founded a magazine for his daughter, and then closed it down after she got into college.

Back in my day, it wasn’t quite so hard to get into college. And yet, I’m proud to say, my peers worked every bit as hard, and we relied on our wits, not our parents’ cash. An especially sneaky friend of mine began his Harvard application essay with the sentence, “Three out of my four grandparents are white.” He neglected to mention the little detail that his fourth grandparent was also white. Another classmate listed “captain of volleyball team” among her achievements. The part she left out was that the coach, taking a cue from the school’s ambitious college counseling department, had appointed everyone on the team to that lofty position (even a few who didn’t try out). And then there’s my friend Sarah, who vowed, as she filled out her application, that she would not claim an unfair advantage in the race by dropping the name of her uncle, the esteemed poet and Harvard student. By the time she got to the last question, however, she decided to toss justice to the wind and wrote, “As I was saying to my uncle Robert Lowell at dinner last night …” (Fame + Legacy is like landing on a double-word square in Scrabble.)

I wish I could tell you that, unlike these imposters, I got into Harvard because of the letter of recommendation Stephen Hawking wrote in which he gushed about our memorable Wednesday afternoons—and, oh, yes, the standing ovation I received after I warbled the lead in Cosi Fan Tutte with the Metropolitan Opera probably impressed the admissions committee, too. But the truth is that I was the most conniving candidate of the bunch. Note, for instance, how I answered the question, “Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about yourself?”: “The children’s books I have written and illustrated are currently under consideration for publication at Putnam Publishing’s Braille division.” In other words—words I did not use—I had mailed the manuscripts to the company, as could anyone who had an envelope and a stamp. The books were returned to me with a polite rejection note the same day the good news from Harvard showed up in my mailbox.