Thinking about applying to Stanford University, one of the most selective universities in America — with a less than 5% admission rate and all? Well, why try to get the best grades in the most rigorous courses, earn the best test scores, and participate in the most interesting extracurricular activities when you can just move into a Stanford dormitory and pretend you’re a student? Sound ridiculous? It sure is ridiculous. But it’s precisely what a young person by the name of William Curry did for nearly a year on the Palo Alto, California campus.

As Theo Baker reports for The Stanford Daily in a piece entitled “Imposter recounts his time on campus,” “William Curry, the Alabama man who lived on campus for almost a year under false pretenses, said he ‘honestly, really couldn’t [say]’ why he chose to pose as a student in an interview with The Daily. When asked what he was doing on campus, Curry said he was ‘just living the normal Stanford life, meeting people, socializing, as you do in college.’ Across five different dorms, according to reports from residents and communications obtained by The Daily, Curry worked hard to squash suspicions, coming up with new stories several times and moving to different dorms when he was removed, aided by a lack of schoolwide University response. Curry said he lied to people in high school about attending Stanford and claimed his parents believed he was enrolled in the University.”

Ok, so maybe it didn’t totally work out for William Curry who seems to have watched Catch Me If You Can a few too many times. The truth eventually did catch up with him. So if you’re considering not applying to an elite university like Stanford but instead just moving into their dorms and making it seem like you’re a student, you might reconsider, well, everything! And, as to Stanford’s administrators for not catching on sooner to this ruse, you might consider upping your security measures on campus to better protect your students, faculty, and staff. Just saying!