Admissions officers/essay coaches of Reddit: what was the most pretentious application you’ve ever seen?
Comment: I reviewed an application from someone with test scores and grades in the upper percentiles of the school’s average. As long as the essay was inoffensive and decent we would let him in. But his essay was easily the most awful thing I had ever read to the point where I assumed that he was trying to sabotage his application. However, after we rejected him, he (not his parents) called the school complaining and sent an appeal begging for acceptance.
His essay started out ok. The first paragraph he talked about why he chose this school (that was the prompt) and what he hoped to achieve in his time in college. So far so good. But then it got weird. He talked about how he wanted to stop discrimination (the applicant was white) and how he saw racism for the first time in middle school kickball. Whenever a black kid would come up to bat, all of the outfielders would spread out. The applicant described this as “systemic racism” and his way of solving it was to kick the fall further than any black person on his team, which he did. First of all, the whole racism topic came out of nowhere and the story didn’t tie into anything.
After this he started talking about his favorite podcasts, even mentioning some by name. “If you want to know more about my personality, just listen to this podcast and you’ll get a better understand of who I am as a person.” He closed the paper by saying, “I would like to close this paper with a quote,” which I thought was a joke because there was nothing left on the page, just that single sentence. Apparently he just hit enter on his keyboard a bunch of times because on the next page was the “quote” that he wanted to close the essay with. It was a full page long manuscript of a Richard Pryor comedy routine about going to Africa for the first time. Yes he kept all of the n-words in the routine, and even went so far as to replace all of the “soft rs” with “hard rs” for no apparent reason. At the end were three links to the podcast that he mentioned which I didn’t listen to because the essay was printed out when I read it so I couldn’t click the links.
I’ve found the funniest person on the internet. They are an anonymous reddit troll from 2020.
A sample of his work: