By Lily Fitzpatrick

Dear Olivia,

After careful review of your application to Amazon University, we regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you a place in the class of 2052.

We recognize that this decision may come as a disappointment to you, so for your peace of mind, we have compiled a list of reasons why you were not accepted. This is a brand-new policy instituted due to our recent absorption of the eight Ivy League institutions which may otherwise have served as your safety schools.

Although your grades—straight A+’s, a 4.2 GPA—may once have been considered exceptional, they are now identical to those of nearly every other applicant. Had you taken twenty AP courses instead of eighteen and had AP Art History been replaced by AP Rocket Science or AP Cloning, perhaps these academic achievements would hold more value.

Since we are test optional, it is generally the best policy not to send an SAT score at all unless it is competitive. Yours—1590—was, like your grades, regrettably average; however, with the knowledge that a test score alone does not present a holistic picture of an applicant, we proceeded to your extracurriculars.

As President of the Speech & Debate team, you brought your team to nationals; however, you did not win. This display of mediocrity might have been overlooked in light of your musical theatre accomplishments—Elle in Legally Blonde, Velma in Chicago, Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, etc.—but we could not help but notice your conspicuous lack of professional experience. While we recognize that audition opportunities may have been limited during the three-year COVID-44 pandemic, the fact remains that during your fifteen years of dance training and acting classes, you failed even to receive a Broadway callback. This suggests that your talents, outside your school’s theatre community, are nothing special.

It is truly a shame that you never played a real sport, such as lacrosse or field hockey. On the field, rather than the stage, you could perhaps have excelled—but such speculation cannot rewrite the past.

One letter of recommendation described you as “fiercely hardworking, with the patience and kindness of a saint.” The volunteer work you recorded—68 hours singing in a nursing home, 100 hours knitting sweaters for rescue puppies, 120 hours building polar bear habitats out of recycled refrigerators—seemed to confirm these praises; however, the more letters we read, the more our interest waned. Your teachers–not to mention your directors, advisors, supervisors, and employers–failed to describe you in anything but the most glowing of terms. Frankly, we are not looking for teacher’s pets; our professors, amid groundbreaking research, do not have time to cultivate personal relationships of any kind with their students.

During your two years as a Target cashier, you have received no pay raise. Since your employer, in his letter, seemed pleased with your work, this signifies a disturbing lack of assertiveness and self-advocacy. We were willing to disregard this shortcoming, however, if you proved extraordinary in other areas.

Unfortunately, we found your essay topic to be very ordinary indeed. The death of a loved one in a house fire is right up there with dream-crushing sports injuries and childhood abuse; we receive thousands of such stories and must confess to becoming rather desensitized to them. With all due sympathy, it is rather a shame that your mother did not die in a plane crash on her way to receive cancer treatment, or in a violent mugging tragically unprevented by bystanders.

The concerning amount of financial aid you require gave us further pause; the university has admittedly fallen on hard times in the wake of constructing brand-new, state-of-the-art athletic facilities on each of our campuses. Moreover, we noticed that your father is an alumnus of Amazon University; yet, he has donated only 35% of his income to us since graduating. In fact, he has even failed to pay off his student loan debts after twenty years; we will not, of course, disclose to you the amount owed.

We encourage you to apply again next year. In the meantime, we wish you the best of luck in all your endeavors—particularly your accumulation of Target wages.

Sincerely,

Preston Bezos
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid