Be Warned of Poseurs

Colleges & Universities A-Z University of Pennsylvania
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<p>Aiight folks. For the past few weeks this guy posing to be a Wharton student has been sending me IMs. This guys AIM SN is FutureWallSter (I know I know rather obvious). It sort of got obvious when he didn’t know what in the world spring fling was. So today he was telling me how the adcoms sent off his email to propective students to ask questions etc. Seizing the opportunity I asked him what his email was and after like 5 minutes he replies thats its some: <a href=“mailto:michael.smith@wharton.upenn.edu”>michael.smith@wharton.upenn.edu</a>. After a search on the Upenn directory didn’t show any results, I decided to send a test email. The email bounced. I suggest that you guys don’t just openly share information or ENTIRE essay responses with random people just IMing you. It was painfully obvious in this instance but many times the guise can be well created. </p>

<p>Be warned.</p>

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<p>I want to remind you, though, that there are plenty of students at Penn who DO infact contact prospective students - usually from the same area as the student or with the same desired field of study - so don't discount every such email you receive because of one bad apple.</p>

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<p>BTW, you can also tell that eh was a poser because penn doesn't give email names with a dot in the middle.</p>

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<p>snipanlol>I will keep that in mind.</p>

<p>Aurelius> Yes I know. I was under the impression that its first letter of first name and then last name. However, just in case I decided to shoot an email through to check it out.</p>

<p>Pretty sad really.</p>

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<p>you can also tell because no pennkey is longer than 8 characters (though alumni.upenn.edu addresses are not technically pennkeys, and have no such restriction, but that's beside the point)</p>

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<p>Damn. I didn't know about the alumni.upenn.edu emails. I thought they just used your pennkey for that.</p>

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<p>Futurewallster is a poster on CC.</p>

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<p>If a student contacts you by email claiming he is a Penn student, most likely he will be using his upenn.edu email address. Otherwise, if he doesn't do that and you want to check he is in fact a Penn student, just ask him to send you an email from his upenn.edu address.</p>

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<p>He contacted me through AIM. As I have said, I was suspicious from the start....the email was just the clincher.</p>

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<p>I am a student and use my gmail account, but just because gmail owns face. But yeah that email you posted is totally wrong, haha.</p>

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<p>You can forward your SAS account to gmail, and even respond and send emails through gmail, but you can have the mail be "from" your SAS account. Not sure how it works or about the other schools.</p>

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<p>


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<p>Well, most schools have a mail server from which you can access and send e-mail through a client (Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora etc.). GMail has a functionality that acts like a client to the Penn server and acts like a server to you.</p>

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<p>Yeah the alumni.upenn.edu email address can be anything you want :)</p>

<p>Wharton also has lifelong email addresses but those are firstname.lastname.wh99 (or whatever your grad year is) @wharton.upenn.edu.</p>