Stanford "Student" Outed As Imposter
We typically don't venture much farther afield in our college coverage than the pretty fields of Cambridge or the Burger Kings of New Haven, but this report, from the Harvard of Palo Alto, was simply too good to pass up. Seems that one Azia Kim lived in a Stanford dorm for eight months because she was pretending to go to school there, resorting to sneaking into her room through the window because she didn't have a Stanford ID. Her roommate—whom she had basically tricked into letting her stay there—didn't notice because she was usually staying with her boyfriend.
Kim started her con on Sept. 18, 2006, the day before New Student Orientation began. She told Kimball roommates Jenssy Rojina '09 and Missy Penna '09, a star softball pitcher, that she was a freshman who was temporarily out of housing due to a technical mixup, according to Zhou.
Rojina and Penna, who both declined comment, believed Kim's story and let her sleep in their room. Kim apparently told Rojina that she moved into Kimball because she disliked her assigned roommate. Kim squatted in the 210-resident dorm — splitting her time between her "room" and the Kimball lounge — for the majority of fall and winter quarter.
"'I ate with this girl, I went to San Francisco with this girl, she was like my sister' — that's what Rojina said to me," said a friend of Rojina's. "She told me that [Kim] crashed there every night."
By the next semester, she had moved on to another student's room:
Kim had neither a Stanford ID nor a key, forcing her to sneak into meals and enter her room through its window, which overlooked the Munger construction pit, the Wilbur parking lot and a dumpster, three feet off the ground. [Her roommate Amy] Zhou never noticed, as she spent nearly all her nights in her boyfriend's room.
"She took off the screen and always left one of the windows wide open and the blinds up," Zhou said. "I just guessed she always wanted a breezy room."
To avoid suspicion while in Okada, Kim pretended to be a sophomore majoring in human biology, going as far as to buy textbooks and study with friends for tests she would never take. Residents of the 94-person dorm were none the wiser.
We think they should've just let her stay, but apparently that wasn't an option.
