<p>According to today's article in the Stanford Daily, Kim had a Stanford ID from a summer program -- my son has one of those, too, but I'd always assumed they looked different, "special" in some way, and could be told apart from school-year IDs. </p>
<p>I guess she's "lucky" that with our mild climate here in the winter she was able to leave the room window open all year long to get in. (And that she found a roommate to sponge off of, in a first-floor room, who spent most of her time in her boyfriend's room.)</p>
<p>Do you think Kim was actually hoping Stanford would eventually just "let her in" since she'd been so creative and convincing in her fraud? I will be sincerely disappointed if they do any such thing (although I saw lots of comments from college students on the newspaper website supporting doing just that! astounding).</p>
<p>$50,000 can go a long way towards buying food, books, etc to keep up the facade. I hope her parents require her to repay the money, perhaps with interest, since it's quite possible it WILL cost them nearly that much anyway. In an interesting quote from the Mercury</a> News article about this today:
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Her Stanford vacation could cost $44,000, based on the daily $175 fee charged by the university for unauthorized visitors. That's the same price as an official education, but without the college credit.
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Do you think Kim was actually hoping Stanford would eventually just "let her in" since she'd been so creative and convincing in her fraud? I will be sincerely disappointed if they do any such thing (although I saw lots of comments from college students on the newspaper website supporting doing just that! astounding).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I highly doubt it, as it would encaurage others to try...</p>
<p>Today there is a story in the Stanford Daily about a possible second imposter, who has been posing as a graduate student in a Stanford physics lab for FOUR YEARS, apparently without affiliation with the university, with the awareness of people in the lab who claim to be unable to do anything about it (?!), and with not much to show for herself.
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As far as I know, she has no official connection with anyone in the physics department, [string theorist and Physics Prof. Leonard] Susskind said. In fact, as far as I can tell, she has a very limited knowledge of physics itself.
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Yau told The Daily that the lab was a “public space” and that she could not legally prohibit Okazaki from entering the building without a restraining order.
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<p>Forgive me, folks, but (a) Stanford is a private university, and (b) even if it were a UC, there is a misadventure, otherwise as trespassing. i.e. being on property without permission. Someone from the university counsel's office should have a talk with Ms. Yau.</p>
[quote]
There have always been "characters" around Stanford. A Chinese guy lived around the physics building for decades until he died. He was "stranded" after Mao took power and never figured out an alternative. He was the "ghost of the quad" pacing at night in his lab coat.
There was another guy who surfed the departmental beer hours often on Friday scarfing free beer and food. Used to carry a huge stack of newspapers and get into philosophical debates. Didnt have a Stanford connection.
<p>TooRichForAid: Parents should be able to view their kids' grades because of a few disturbed people who do crazy things? I'd be surprised if you even needed to resort to your toes to count the amount of people who've gotten away with this sort of thing for any length of time. This does not justify parents seeing the grades of their adult offspring.</p>
<p>Why the hostility, folks? I don't know Kim's motivation, but she hasn't hurt anyone. Several posters referred to Steve Jobs, who similarly mooched on Reed's hospitality when his family came up short on tuition -- Reed regards Jobs as a distinguished alumnus (Jobs, in turn, credits a Reed calligraphy class for Apple/Lisa/Mac typefaces, though that may be mostly apocryphal). I think it's just mean-spirited to demonize the young woman. She'd been a summer student at Stanford and liked it there -- so she stayed. She broke into an exclusive club. She got busted. Let it drop.</p>
<p>"Coming up short on tuition" is a mite different than crashing the dorms and classes for a year at a school where you were not admitted. (And wouldn't so many students have preferred to go to their "dream school" where they weren't admitted! I think a dose of reality is prescribed here.)</p>
<p>I don't read hostility and demonizing in this thread. I read astonishment and a hope that she'll rectify the misuse of her parents' money and trust, and perhaps get counseling for herself. While Kim appears to have been pretty much a benign presence, I know a number of parents of Stanford students who are concerned this week that if she had been someone with ill intentions, she still could have gotten away with the facade and perhaps done some harm. As a wake-up call, this incident may have its silver lining. She has introduced an element of fear and distrust which was not present before.</p>
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As a wake-up call, this incident may have its silver lining. She has introduced an element of fear and distrust which was not present before.
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<p>Okay, that was my point. Does the world need more fear and distrust? Jobs attended classes in which he was not enrolled, crashed in rooms he didn't pay for, and did no harm.</p>
<p>And what has any of this to do with parents? The kid was apparently having a good time and learning something. I didn't read anything about parental pressure.</p>
<p>I may be way wrong on this thought, but I have a feeling that there are probably a lot of instances of non-students "living" in college dorms--friends, girlfriends or boyfriends of enrolled students, etc. </p>
<p>This one is unusual in that her parents were apparently unaware of the ruse, but from the point of view of campus security (which was the university's theme in their shock at the discovery), I think it is probably breached a lot, at a lot of different schools. On some level, I have always assumed this to be the case and I am actually somewhat sure I know of one such kid at a local campus. </p>
<p>I can understand that in light of the recent concerns about campus security, that this would become an issue; whereas up until this story broke, I have just thought of it as kind of a benign fact of life in a large institutional setting like this.</p>
<p>I disagree that parents should be able to view their student's grades. Most college students are over 18 and are really young adults. Plus it's not as if a lot of people are lying about going to college.</p>
<p>Interesting story. In the wake of what I felt was unfair criticism about a certain school (not so much on this board as elsewhere, though), it is interesting to see that numerous institutions could have their security called into question. Hoefully actions will be taken and also other institutions will try to learn from this also.</p>
<p>fudgemaster, most parents who are paying for their child's college expenses deserve to know whether their money is being well spent. If I'm shelling out many tens of thousands of dollars a year, my kid darned well better be showing me his grades, and they'd better not be awful grades. Don't show me your grades? I don't need to pay for tuition, room, and board next year. If you're adult enough to not share with me how you're doing while spending my money, you're free to be adult enough to earn your own money to pay for it in future.</p>
<p>I'm also thinking there may be an explanation other than parental pressure. I read Steve Jobs account of his experience at Reed, which happens to be part of a Stanford commencement address he gave that is very easy to find on the internet. Jobs quit Reed after the first semester but stayed there, auditing classes, for another 18 months. He quit largely for financial reasons -- he just wasn't happy about his parents paying money for classes that he had little interest in. When he spoke, he said dropping out was the best choice he had ever made, because he was then able to stay on campus and attend only the classes he was interested in ... learning just what he wanted to learn.</p>
<p>What if this girl had the same idea? Perhaps after attending a summer program she felt that she really loved Stanford, but perhaps even if she had been admitted, she knew Stanford was out of reach financially for her family. Perhaps she even had read about Steve Jobs, and wanted to do the same thing - stick around as long as possible, taking the classes that interested her, getting as much of Stanford as she could before facing the inevitable reality that she would have to attend a far less prestigious college that her family could afford.</p>
<p>Who knows what she told her family? Perhaps she made up a story about a scholarship, or claimed there was some sort of special extension program that she could attend for less money. I mean - the extension idea is not too far-fetched -- the UC's have extension programs, Harvard has an extension.... all the kid would have to do is tell the parents that Stanford had a program like Harvard's. (Now I'm starting to wonder how many Harvard squatters there may be....it would be very, very easy to pose as an extension student while informally auditing the larger classes and it probably would be a very long time before people would ask too many questions).</p>
<p>mootmom, isn't this between you and your child? You can set that rule, and your child will either show you the grades or not, depending on whether or not that child wants to have college paid for by you. The school should not be involved in that. There very well could be family dynamics, such as abusive or manipulative parent who could use those grades as an excuse (as if they needed one) to turn on the child or other parent, etc., or use them to prove they were right in not wanting kid to go to a certain school, etc. When you come from a relatively "normal" household, this is not even an issue, but for some kids it might be. And these are adults, after all. When does hovering end? 18? 21? 30? At some point, our children need to learn to be independent. Who knows what would have happened to this child had she not done this and gone to a different school? How would that resentment have come out? She obviously has some problems, problems that obviously didn't come out before. This is the best thing that could have happened for her. Now she will be able to get some help. And I remember that kids had guests all the time. Breach of security? You can't stop the kid from holding the door open for someone behind them, or allowing someone they thought was a friend from spending the night. This has been a time-honored tradition at colleges forever. The only way to stop this would be to have a guard at every door checking ID's before anyone entered a classroom or dorm, and alarms on screens on all windows (first floor and basement rooms have those at D's school).</p>