Conning Harvard: The True Story of the Con Artist Who Faked His Way into the Ivy League by Julie Zauzmer & Xi Yu

Author:Julie Zauzmer & Xi Yu [Zauzmer, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780762787432
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2013-09-03T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Fresh from a summer at Oxford, Adam Wheeler returned to Harvard his senior year ready to push his luck once more. This time, he decided to apply for the Rhodes and Fulbright Scholarships.

The Rhodes has routinely been called the world’s most prestigious scholarship. With a brutal 2 percent acceptance rate (just 32 American students per year), it puts even Harvard to shame in selectivity. The lucky few win an all-expenses-paid graduate education at Oxford University in England. Winners of this glamorous opportunity to study at one of the world’s leading academic powerhouses have gone on to become luminaries in a variety of fields, from science to journalism to sports to the Supreme Court.

One of the many distinguished recipients was United States Senator James William Fulbright, who later founded a similar program that grants free upper-level education to exceptionally bright students. Today, Fulbright’s program is nearly as renowned as the Rhodes. The Fulbright grant sponsors a variety of trips, including some that send American teachers and other professionals abroad and some that whisk foreign students to the United States for cultural education. What interested Wheeler was the award that pays for American students to study, research, or teach abroad for a year.

It is a recognized mark of academic excellence for a student to walk away from college with one of these cushy fellowships. Wheeler, who had already sought so hungrily to establish his credentials as an academic, would make an eager candidate.

Through his skill as a forger and plagiarist, he had already earned $6,000 in prizes, a summer in England, and admission to Harvard. He was out to get himself a Rhodes or Fulbright, too.

The applications were rigorous, but they looked a lot like the applications he had seen when applying to college (the first and second times). Both scholarships demanded a transcript, letters of recommendation, and a personal essay. The Fulbright also required a written proposal for the research project that the money would fund. The Rhodes wanted a list of his activities and a photograph.

The photo could be real. All the rest was going to take some doctoring.

With the experience of faking transcripts from Andover and MIT under his belt, he turned in a forged Harvard transcript this time. It depicted him as a student at Harvard since freshman year. Recalling the one semester he took six classes, he decided that the version of him that would merit a Rhodes or Fulbright would have taken six classes in each semester of his sophomore and junior years, including a few at Harvard Law School in addition to his graduate coursework in English. His freshman year, when by Harvard rules he would have been allowed to take just four classes in his first semester (if he had actually been at Harvard at all), he put himself down as having taken five each semester anyway. He gave himself As in every single class except for an A-minus in one biology course. Altogether, it added up to a distinctly untrue GPA of 3.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.