May 25, 2007

For Impostor Student at Stanford, Cardinal Rule Was Just Showing Up

A California student with her heart set on Stanford seems to have taken literally Woody Allen’s famous aphorism that “80 percent of success is just showing up.”

According to The Stanford Daily, 18-year-old Azia Kim appeared last fall on the Stanford campus, even though she had not been admitted, and spent the next eight months posing as a biology major, buying textbooks, attending classes, and cramming with friends for exams she couldn’t take.

The enterprising Ms. Kim told an unsuspecting sophomore that she had been assigned to be her roommate. But, lacking a room key or Stanford ID, Ms. Kim had to sneak into dining halls and climb through a first-floor window to enter her room.

Her roommate spent so much time at her boyfriend’s that she never witnessed those dramatic entrances or wondered why Ms. Kim had removed the screen and always left the window open. “I just guessed she always wanted a breezy room,” she told the student newspaper.

The jig was up last week, when the dormitory staff members decided to compile a yearbook for their residents and realized they had no information on the squatter. The newspaper speculated that Ms. Kim may have “felt pressure from overbearing parents to attend Stanford — regardless of whether she was admitted.”

Ms. Kim’s family seemed not to know she had not actually enrolled at Stanford. The latest posting on Ms. Kim’s MySpace page, from her sister, says, “Good Luck on FINALS!!!”

Ms. Kim’s career at Stanford also took former high-school classmates by surprise: “Azia wasn’t the strongest student,” one told the newspaper. “The fact that she was at Stanford was surprising to everybody. She just didn’t have the spectacular grades or extracurriculars.”

The university’s housing department charges unauthorized visitors $175 a day, the paper reported, so Ms. Kim’s eight-month stay could add up to a $42,000 bill — about the price of a year’s tuition, room, and board at Stanford. Some Stanford students have suggested that the university reward Ms. Kim’s chutzpah with honorary-student status. To judge by their comments, however, Stanford officials are not amused.

While impressive, Ms. Kim is not yet the most accomplished collegiate con artist. In 1989 the 30-year-old James A. Hogue was admitted to Princeton after posing as Alexi Indris Santana, a self-taught sheep-raising orphan from Utah. Some years after Mr. Hogue was unmasked, he used a false identity to get a job at a Harvard museum, where he stole $50,000 worth of gems. In 1996 he was caught trespassing at Princeton under yet another alias. —Paula Wasley

Comments

1. Showing up so consistently should’ve been the tip-off—real students don’t show up all the time.

   — Jeffry Larson    May 29, 02:43 PM    #

2. So, Ms. Kim was not a legal student, and she lacked the documentation she required for access to vital support systems. As most of you know, we not only allow “undocumented students” (PC for “illegal aliens”) access to our intitutions of higher education, we help pay the way. Check out http://www.finaid.org/otheraid/undocumented.phtml. What’s the difference?

   Don’t tell me the difference is that the undocumented children of illegal aliens earned admission, while Ms. Lee did not. If you want to earn something, you’ll do it by following the rules. Otherwise its called cheating – or even stealing, since legal residents and citizens are the ones who pay the bills.

   — Floyd Bowles    May 29, 02:59 PM    #

3. Cultural pressures can be great, and until we hear Ms. Kim’s rationale for her actions, it is difficult to pass judgement. Ms. Kim did break the rules and should face the appropriate consequences. Stanford university, however, should take this as an opportunity to see what motivated her to do what she did and see how they can be good public citzens and help this from happening again.

   — MNF    May 29, 04:35 PM    #

4. When I first saw this story, I was wondering how long it would take for someone to hijack the discussion to the whole immigration issue. Mr. Bowles, I find it very disturbing you equate Ms. Kim and illegal immigrants so readily. Ms. Kim is an American. Not all people with non-English surnames are illegal immigrants.

   — EJS    May 30, 04:22 PM    #

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