Tag Archives: Ivygate

Princeton Student Attempts to Troll Student Election, Fails

Speaking of WSA election season (yes, it’s too late to vote), check out this Princeton application for 2012 Class Secretary, which the Princeton University Press Club has declared the “Best Student Government Application EVER!” Princeton’s UPC has perhaps never visited Wesleyan, where trolling a WSA election is as common as reading Kant or getting naked in Olin.

Still, this anonymous student’s application (IvyGate has decided on the pseudonym “Steve Holt,” which provides an amusing coincidence for Wesleyan) offers a few laughs, most notably in Holt’s ideas for how to make class government “unforgettable”:

  • Build a giant straw man effigy of Dean Malkiel on Poe Field. Place Dean Malkiel inside and burn said straw man to the ground in a sacrifice to the GPA Gods, so that we might be blessed with our pre-grade deflation GPAs.
  • Reinstate the nude olympics. And by “nude” I mean naked and covered in fluffer nutter and by “olympics” I mean a tribalistic orgy of trance-inducing chanting charged with a shamanistic flow of hallucinogen-fueled energy, taking place in Tilghman’s office.
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Speaking of Notable Prefrosh: JFK’s Harvard App

John F. Kennedy: outstanding U.S. president, brother of Ted Kennedy P ’83, Hon ’84, mediocre Harvard applicant??

It’s been half a century since JFK (Harvard ’40) was inaugurated president. In commemoration of the occasion, reports the Harvard Crimson‘s Flyby blog, the JFK Presidential Library and Museum has “opened a virtual treasure trove of digitized documents concerning the personal and professional life of America’s 35th president, including Kennedy’s complete 1935 application to Harvard College.”

Shit—and here I was all excited when I only just found out I can access my own application (to Wes, not Harvard) via the dean’s office.  Kennedy’s application is online here—including his astoundingly mediocre high school transcript from The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut (68 average? 50 in Physics? Really, Mr. President?). Among the rest of the contents are a letter of recommendation from family friend Edward E. Moore, an unenthusiastic endorsement from high school principal (“[Jack] can be relied upon to do enough to pass”), and a less-than-inspiring “Why Harvard?” essay, which reads like particularly douchey dialogue from The Social Network (particularly I’m reminded of that especially cringe-worthy scene where the Winkelvoss twins spout all that pompous gibberish about being “men of Harvard“):

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“GET UP AND WALK THE HELL OUT!”

Don’t miss this can’t-possibly-be-real-except-it-is footage of a Cornell professor losing his shit in the middle of a lecture after a rude student interruption—by which I mean, umm, a yawn. Some details, via friends at IvyGate:

A month ago today, Mark Talbert, a senior lecturer in Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, wigged out at a phantom yawner in his 11:40 am HADM 1174: Business Computing lecture. Someone yawned. He was all like “RAWR WHO YAWNED BLAAHGHGGHGHGHHGHG!” and everyone was a little taken aback and confused. And that should have been that.

Unfortunately for Talbert, the Hotel school was recording the lecture for posterity and posted it online. It was only a short step from the Cornell Web site to YouTube.

Really, though, it’s hard to do justice to the professor’s scathing, impassioned tirade against yawning:

“If I hear one more of these overly loud yawns . . . Get up and walk the hell out! Yawn outside!” says an irate Talbert.  “Stay outta class, whatever it is you need to do to get over it, I wanna know why 220 other people don’t find the need to do that.  And you should be asking yourself, why am I the one loser who has to do that?”

Here’s the video, but click past the jump for Talbert’s follow-up, and a classy autotune rendition of the freak-out, courtesy of a Cornell frosh.

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