No matter what your profession, I guess everybody gets a little jaded now and then ... even (perhaps especially) college admissions officers. I'm sure once you've read your billionth essay written by a 17-year-old with big dreams, you stop thinking in terms of individual human beings and start looking at those letters as an endless supply of annoyances addressed to you personally. Everybody's human. BUT that's still no excuse -- not even a tiny bit of an excuse -- for what former Penn admissions officer Nadirah Farah Foley did with the student essays she found most annoying. And as a mother who knows exactly how much blood, sweat and tears goes into even the most awkwardly worded student assignment, what she did with those essays makes me absolutely sick.
What Foley did was to post excerpts from student essays on Facebook and mock them. Cruelly.
One student wrote an essay about his “long and deep” connections to the University (noting that he'd been circumcised at Penn Hillel as an infant), adding “I look forward to engaging in the academic, social and Orthodox Jewish communities on campus."
Foley tore the essay apart:
“Stop the madness," she wrote.
In another essay, a student wrote about how he overcame his fear of using the bathroom outdoors while camping.
“Another gem,” Foley wrote, slamming the boy.
Who the hell does this woman think she is?! These are kids we're talking about here. Maybe not little kids, but still kids -- kids who are pouring their hearts out on paper, kids who haven't learned yet how to censor the most vulnerable parts of themselves. It's Foley's job to decide whether or not these kids are a good match for her school, not to decide whether they're worthwhile human beings. Oh, but wait -- I forgot, Foley doesn't have a job anymore. Because after somebody brought her posts to the Dean of Admission's attention, Foley was fired.
Another gem. Ha!
Do you think this admissions officers deserved to lose her job?
Image via Sean MacEntee/Flickr
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Comments 16
If you're going to college, you're an adult... Not a kid. I went to a college with open admission and I was a nontraditional student, so I didn't have to jump through bullshit hoops. But you gotta be smart enough (common sense, street smart) to know what is relevant to put in an essay. Frankly, no one *really* gives a crap about your essay or why you want to go to that school...same as no one gives a crap what your GPA is after you graduate.
Fact of the matter is, people in *all professions* see their fair share of stupidity and share the idiocy with their friends. Jacqueline and other Stir writers do it every damn day on this site...mocking folks (anonymously or not) for things they do or say.
Yep
While I've been in jobs with the position of reviewing others' writing - and believe me, much of it has been mock-worthy - there's a difference between having a behind-closed-doors giggle with coworkers and posting them to the world's biggest social networking website like a 14 year old who just discovered how to do a selfie. We teach our kids to behave while online. Why is it no longer applicable when you're an adult? Answer: it is. It's a million times worse because you're supposed to know better. Should kids have a thicker skin than to be upset by this? I don't know about that. They'll need to toughen up to survive in the world of adults, but even as an adult, they shouldn't expect to be mocked publicly like this. If these were job applications, the person who posted them on FB would still be an immature moron who deserved to be fired.