UMC suburban college student lied about background to become prestigious Rhodes Scholar

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not only would high school tuition have been paid, September happens to be the same month QuestBridge apps are due. Maybe she stumbled upon QuestBridge, say on reddit or college confidential, and it got her thinking...

I recall stumbling upon those QuestBridge threads on college confidential and being amazed at the schools some of the kids were getting into.

I contend the entire thing was an admissions con. Her being class president tells us she was a striver long before gunning for a Rhodes. Her QuestBridge list likely had HYPS at the top, followed by the other Ivies.

What would her long term goal be? What would she get out of this that she couldn't get by just being a brilliant student?

Harvard. Before this foster crap she was a dime a dozen spoiled rich white girl with As. She wanted to go to HYPS... Penn wasn’t the goal, it was probably at the end of her Questbridge rank.

[Anonymous]

Re: the three week hospital stays. My guess is the initial hospitalizations turned into psych holds for whatever reason. As a PP stated above, if it was severe epilepsy or a battered body, those details would have been shared by here if there was evidence.

[Anonymous]

[Sept. 2014] Criminal complaint against mom (later dropped by prosecutor), puts foster placement in motion?

[Sept. 2015] Her QuestBridge app was due.

[Nov. 2015-Jan. 2016] Turns 18, aged out of foster system?

[May 2016] Prep school graduation.

Fascinating that a wealthy white woman with a medical doctor mother who did not qualify for a poor, URM, foster kid, first-generation college program stumbles upon it and miraculously wins it inside of 12 months. The timing is too convenient and coincidental, which suggests she knew about QuestBridge before she lobbed the criminal complaint against her mother. There is no better college admissions hook than QuestBridge. This has all the hallmarks of a ruthless prestige-obsessed student who was willing to do whatever it took to get into Harvard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:[Sept. 2014] Criminal complaint against mom (later dropped by prosecutor), puts foster placement in motion?

[Sept. 2015] Her QuestBridge app was due.

[Nov. 2015-Jan. 2016] Turns 18, aged out of foster system?

[May 2016] Prep school graduation.

Fascinating that a wealthy white woman with a medical doctor mother who did not qualify for a poor, URM, foster kid, first-generation college program stumbles upon it and miraculously wins it inside of 12 months. The timing is too convenient and coincidental, which suggests she knew about QuestBridge before she lobbed the criminal complaint against her mother. There is no better college admissions hook than QuestBridge. This has all the hallmarks of a ruthless prestige-obsessed student who was willing to do whatever it took to get into Harvard.

yeah, and Penn fell for it

[Anonymous]

Did she change her surname in college so the Rhodes selection committee couldn't find the old her and her doctor mother on Google and social media?

[Anonymous]

Penn was likely largely trusting QuestBridge's original vetting. It's tragic QuestBridge let a wealthy girl play them and win this award, while someone genuinely poor and actually deserving lost. Probably because the genuinely poor had to attend crummy public schools and couldn't write essays as well as the elite private school rich girl pretending to be a victim.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Penn was likely largely trusting QuestBridge's original vetting. It's tragic QuestBridge let a wealthy girl play them and win this award, while someone genuinely poor and actually deserving lost. Probably because the genuinely poor had to attend crummy public schools and couldn't write essays as well as the elite private school rich girl pretending to be a victim.

well, to be fair, I think she is a victim in her own mind, I mean her mother "broke her." Ok? Depends on if you believe that or not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Did she change her surname in college so the Rhodes selection committee couldn't find the old her and her doctor mother on Google and social media?

Yes. Because she is ruthless. Otherwise she could have shamed her mother publicly into paying for her college.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Re: the three week hospital stays. My guess is the initial hospitalizations turned into psych holds for whatever reason. As a PP stated above, if it was severe epilepsy or a battered body, those details would have been shared by here if there was evidence.

She clearly played for sympathy. I agree it was a psych hold.

Her mother not speaking publicly about it is interesting. I feel like perhaps McKenzie needs to be taken by the hand. I just do not understand how your daughter gets this far. Shouldn't she have told Penn? Questbridge?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Re: the three week hospital stays. My guess is the initial hospitalizations turned into psych holds for whatever reason. As a PP stated above, if it was severe epilepsy or a battered body, those details would have been shared by here if there was evidence.

She clearly played for sympathy. I agree it was a psych hold.

Her mother not speaking publicly about it is interesting. I feel like perhaps McKenzie needs to be taken by the hand. I just do not understand how your daughter gets this far. Shouldn't she have told Penn? Questbridge?

How would her mother know of all the QuestBridge, how she got into Penn, and how it was being paid for details? And honestly, getting into Penn with her real rich girl CV isn't really abnormal, so I don't think Penn would shock her. I would assume the mom was curious about how it was all being paid for, but aside from that not much she could do. It sounds like this Rhodes thing is the first time this all hit the media, including back home, which explained a lot, including Questbridge, right?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not only would high school tuition have been paid, September happens to be the same month QuestBridge apps are due. Maybe she stumbled upon QuestBridge, say on reddit or college confidential, and it got her thinking...

I recall stumbling upon those QuestBridge threads on college confidential and being amazed at the schools some of the kids were getting into.

I contend the entire thing was an admissions con. Her being class president tells us she was a striver long before gunning for a Rhodes. Her QuestBridge list likely had HYPS at the top, followed by the other Ivies.

What would her long term goal be? What would she get out of this that she couldn't get by just being a brilliant student?

Harvard. Before this foster crap she was a dime a dozen spoiled rich white girl with As. She wanted to go to HYPS... Penn wasn’t the goal, it was probably at the end of her Questbridge rank.

Actually she wasn’t. She was a scholar athlete with top grades and president of her class. That’s not dime a dozen. And she did it while missing the first month of class in her junior year and then living in 3 different foster homes the rest of that year. She continued living in the last foster home in her senior year. See how many kids can maintain top tier status with all of that instability in junior year when grades are the most critical for college admisssions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Re: the three week hospital stays. My guess is the initial hospitalizations turned into psych holds for whatever reason. As a PP stated above, if it was severe epilepsy or a battered body, those details would have been shared by here if there was evidence.

Your “guess” is just complete BS. Why are you making stuff up and then treating your made up crap like it’s fact when it isn’t. To the extent that anything from the hospital stay has been revealed, it’s listed her as being treated for a seizure disorder. That’s the only fact we know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Actually she wasn’t. She was a scholar athlete with top grades and president of her class. That’s not dime a dozen. And she did it while missing the first month of class in her junior year and then living in 3 different foster homes the rest of that year. She continued living in the last foster home in her senior year. See how many kids can maintain top tier status with all of that instability in junior year when grades are the most critical for college admisssions.

Wow, president of her class?! Spoiler: Her year at Whitfield had less than 75 graduates. A's, sports, private school, student government is a dime resume when it comes to Ivy applicants. Shoot, it's dime a dozen when it comes to UVA and Michigan applicants. She was a pumpkin spice latte rich white girl who had good grades until she created the fake struggle narrative. And interesting how there's never a mention of her SAT score, so it must be sort of mediocre.

[Anonymous]

It must be really hard to play multiple sports when your ritzy day school has like 350 high school kids total. Surprised she didn't walk on to any teams at Penn. lol

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:DP

Okay, PP.


Doesn't change anything about the fabrications and lies. Let's wait until she takes this to trial and see what shakes out. She's an adult -- if she wants to air it all out and have her story tested and publicly evaluated for truth, she can do that.

I suspect the mother has plenty of evidence. What's shocking is that a doctor with one child couldn't control that one child. I suspect the mother got bad advice in the beginning.

Maybe she is still getting bad advice.

The mom probably had her own life and not very involved. I suspect she paid for the last year of private as you have to prepay.

Someone close to the girl if not the girl has been in this thread and repeatedly said the ritzy day school gave her a "full scholarship" for 12th grade. Her school is $30,000 a year. But then someone recently claimed she was in the foster system for two years. So did she get "full scholarships" for both 11th and 12th?

She pulled the stunt in September of her junior year. I assume she chose the time because the tuition (which her mother had paid as usual) had just become non refundable. And the person was arguing very carefully: they said she lived with foster families for two years. Mackenzie was in the foster system for less than a year, from the fall of her junior year until the August before her senior year. But she continued to live with her last foster family throughout her senior year of high school. So: one year in the foster system, one year of scholarship, two years “living with foster families.”

With Mackenzie, you have to parse every word.

Agree she stretched the truth, but if not she probably would not have gotten a scholarship and she was in a no win situation in terms of college if they look at parents income and parents wouldn't pay. Two years in foster care is no picnic.

But let's be clear -- it was a year or less actually in "foster care," unless you are counting overlapping from fall of one year to summer of the next as two years, just because there are numerically two separate years bridged.

Foster care lasts until the 18th birthday. She was already past her seventeenth birthday.

I don't mean to say that any time in foster care is an easy step, but this story has so much manipulation and parsing of language very carefully to drive it, that I don't want to keep perpetuating inaccuracies.

Do you have teenagers? Because many of them get upset when one of their friends switches out of their art class or there’s a new, “mean” math teacher. It would be absolutely traumatic and disruptive to live outside your family unit for two years. I’m not saying she didn’t amp up the pathos in her story but us insane to act like her situation isn’t a major hardship. Of course her difficulties pale in comparison to kids raised entirely in foster care but I don’t think she hid the timeline nor did she hide the pricey private school. And no, I am not the girl or her friend posting! I’m just someone who works with teens who finds the idea of a disturbed newly 17 year old masterminding this for college admission absurd.

None of what you wrote excuses inaccuracies of fact. You can make all the impassioned pleas you want, but why not stick to the truth? Is it really necessary to bend and stretch it to make your point? Then that either says something about you, or about your point, or both.

I will say it again: I don't mean to say that any time in foster care is an easy step, but this story has so much manipulation and parsing of language very carefully to drive it, that I don't want to keep perpetuating inaccuracies. So I'm calling yours out.