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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/frieden7 on 2024-06-29 15:39:30+00:00.
- I am NOT OP. Original post from r/Btechtards and r/India by u/Strange_Exit2426. Posts have been recovered through screenshots made before deletion and through the wayback machine. It has been lightly edited for typos, to include translations and definitions of acronyms. Editor’s notes in italics.
- Trigger Warnings - manipulation, extreme deception, theft, mention of faked cancer, mention of faked death
OOP’s first post in this saga seems to be this one, from r/India
Received full scholarship from a US university but can’t afford visa & flight cost - May 23, 2023
I have passed my class 12th this year and have received full scholarship from a US university for my undergrad. tuition, housing, food, health insurance and even textbooks is covered in my scholarship/financial aid package.
The only thing I have to pay is for the flights and visa but even that is major financial challenge for my family. the visa will cost around 40K and one way flight from India to US will cost around 1 lakh. that’s a significant amount from my family.
I have already asked my university for help but they said their financial aid policy doesn’t cover visa and transportation costs so they can’t help me in this.
I was wondering if anyone knows any organization or NGO which can help me in this. or what should I do? any advice would be greatly appreciated.
thankyou!
Editor’s note - most comments from OOP were unrecoverable, but comments from other users confirm he would be attending Lehigh University.
Comment: Congratulations man, Lehigh is an absolutely amazing school. Lots of resources already linked here, I’ll just say best of luck, you have a great future ahead of you!
OOP received some advice to watch out for scams, some skepticism about the veracity of his story and some offers of help, including this one:
melayaraja: I am based in New Jersey. Not far from your campus. Please DM proof of your admission and I20. Will provide partial support after review.
I-20 proves that you are legally enrolled in a program of study in the United States
OOP also posted this on r/Lehigh , the sub for his university. No link available at this time:
I was awarded 2,500$ in work study for 2023-24 academic year in which 1250 was for fall and 1250 for the spring.
I was able to earn only about 500$ in the fall, so can I earn the remaining 2000 in the spring or am I allowed to earn a max of 1250 only a semester?
Anyone has any idea about this?
OOP returned nine months later with a new post:
I have built my life and career on LIES and FRAUD - February 22, 2024
read only if u have time, it’s very long but worth it.
So, it all started when our 10th board exams got cancelled. From that day till now, I haven’t seriously studied for even 2 hours. As usual, I took Science in 11th, dreaming of cracking JEE Editor’s note: (Joint Entrance Examination) and all, but soon realized it wasn’t a piece of cake. I barely passed 11th with 49%.
Then, in 12th, I thought I would restart everything and took admission in a dummy school. I might have studied seriously for like 2-3 days, but then again, I started repeating the same things. There was a time in my life where I was just eating, sleeping, and watching movies. I used to watch horror movies all night long for months then sleep the whole day, and my parents thought was studying the whole night. But soon, I realized it’s time, and I need to do something to get into a good college. I again tried studying, but it was not like I didn’t want to study; I wanted to but was not able to understand anything in physics, chemistry even after trying very hard, I was able to understand maths a little, but that wasn’t enough.
Okay, so now the real part comes. I soon realized I wouldn’t be able to get even a 50 percentile in JEE, so then I started looking for colleges abroad and their admission process, fees, everything I was able to find online. Then I found out only in the US some top colleges provide full financial aid to even international students (financial aid is a type of scholarship but based on family’s income), but you need to be like very very good to get those kinds of things like you should have perfect academic scores, perfect extracurriculars, everything but I didn’t have any of those things. I checked these things in, like June, July of my 12th class, and the US universities’ admissions applications starts from 1st Aug and have a deadline of 1st Jan for regular decisions and 1st Nov for early decisions. So, I planned a very very structured fraud plan. They need your 9-11 class result and a predicted result of 12th. I got my result for 9-11 class edited them like in a very perfect way anyone would not recognize as if it’s edited, then made a completely fake predicted result for my 12th class even bought a fake stamp and seal of my school’s principal to make it look perfect.
Then, as all these transcripts needed to be sent by my school’s official email ID, but my school only had a a gmail.com email which, despite being official, looked fake. So, I made a fake email id of my school, not any regular email like [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), I bought a similar website domain of my school and got the email like if it’s of principal then [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) so it looked exactly official, then I started preparing my application, they need your academic achievements in high school, outside of academic achievements, I made a complete full fake profile of me, and I didn’t mention any of the activities like won any olympiad medal or anything I put on which cannot be verified but are still impressive, and even if they wanted to verify something, they would send an email to my school of which I had access to. Then I needed to write some essays like almost every college have a prompt why u want to come here what our college offeres which other colleges dont so i used chatgpt and i know people who has experience in aplying abroad will say chatgpt writes very bad essays but what i did was first looked on some successful and good past essays gave them to chatgpt and said to craft a similar impressove essay for the prompt so i got some decent essays to submit.
Okay, so I did this and applied a bunch of early and regular applications. I applied to almost every single US college which promised to meet the need of every admitted student, which means they would give you a scholarship for the costs you can’t pay, like a typical US college costs about 60-70 lakhs per year including tuition, housing, everything, and let’s if someone could only afford about 30 lakhs per year, so they would give a scholarship or financial aid for that remaining amount; it works like that, and I applied saying I cannot contribute anything to my college education, like not even a single penny but they need like your parents’ income proof and all that before they finalize your decisions, but say your father or mother earns 20 lakhs per year (~$24,000 USD), which is pretty good in India, but it is nothing in America because how can someone who earns 20 lakhs a year and spend 60 lakhs a year on college, so for most of the top colleges, if your parents’ income is not more than like say 3-4 cr, you will get full financial aid because even if someone earns 1 cr a year cannot spend 60-70 lakhs alone on college, and most of the US colleges are need-blind for US citizens which means their ability to pay doesn’t affect their admissions decisions, but for non-US citizens except maybe 4-5 lvy League colleges, all the other colleges are need-aware which means the student’s ability to pay now affects their admission decisions. It doesn’t affect greatly if it’s a top school but still do to an extent.
So I applied and got a bunch of rejections, waitlisted, deferred, and even some acceptances in the early round, but the acceptances weren’t fulfilling my full need, like some were giving full scholarship for tuition, but I still had to pay around 15-20 lakhs a year for housing, food, and everything. Okay, so I got these decisions around mid and end of December, and till now, I hadn’t studied even a bit of 12th grade, even for boards, JEE alone. And the boards were scheduled to start from mid-feb ig, and all the regular decision applications I applied were supposed to be released in mid to end of March. I started studying just to pass, but during boards, I realized how messed up I was except for physical education and english. I thought I would not pass in any of the subjects. In my physics exam, I wrote answers like, I remember there was a question, how are x-ray rays produced, I wrote x-ray rays are produced by x-ray machines. In maths, all I wrote was given in the questions to find or to prove, basically rewrote the questions. I wrote for like 10-15 marks out of 80 in almost all subjects exce…
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