Honestly it’s hard to stay motivated to keep writing about all these #TRYHARDs after covering someone who was accepted into 231 schools before picking a random low-tier school, but the show must go on until the clock hits zero: 16-year old Louisiana girl accepted into 60 colleges, presumably graduating early in order to start college
By now, after writing about 20 of these insufferable #TRYHARDs, I’m kind of having some regret for taking this pointless exercise on, but at the same time, it’s something that keeps me writing even when I don’t want to write about it, and for someone who takes pride in sticking with it, there are worse things to complain about, like my life in general but anyway.
It’s obvious that so many people embark on the path of being a #TRYHARD because it brings them attention and they really like attention, but this particular one seems to have gotten bit by the attention bug at an early age, based on this specific quote from the article:
Poullard has also gone viral as a child, when she met former president Barack Obama.
“Still to this day I don’t realize how hard it is to meet the president,” Poullard said. “My daddy told me before we walked in that White House. He’s like ‘When you see the president run up to him and I bet you’ll go viral’. It’s been like 11 years. I just think that’s so crazy.”
It’s almost like daddy wanted his daughter to get gunned down or something, instructing his child to fucking run at the President of the United States. But clearly the country under Obama probably made it just a hair safer for a five-year old black kid to run at the POTUS, and I didn’t care enough to dig deeper on the claim that she was viral as a kid and being noticed by the internet now for being a #TRYHARD, but it’s evident that the things this 16-year old has done in her life has probably mostly been done in the name of getting attention.
But another telling quote that I found amusing were her so called words of wisdom to those who would also wish to embark on the attention-seeking path of #TRYHARDing:
Just because you don’t have a high A-C-T score or your grades might not be that good, you can still apply to that school if you want to,” Poullard said. “I guarantee you when you have a long list of community services that you’ve done, that’s going to say a lot about you as a person.”
So the takeaway I get from this is that despite being a mediocre student, as long as you don’t set your goals too high, you can still apply to a boatload of schools and get accepted into a lot of them, and as long as you don’t give specifics to the schools you’re applying to, you can still boast that you got into 60 of them and sound like a genius scholar.
I will say though, it must not have been entirely too mediocre, because the reveal at the end is that she’s staying local, and will be going to LSU. As far as I’m concerned, LSU is one of the better known schools that has collected a #TRYHARD, but I also know them primarily for athletics and know nothing about them academically. I do know though, that LSU is a school that does party real hard, and has some rough partying culture, and if I’m a parent, I’m definitely sweating sending my 16-year old daughter away to LSU.
For a kid that has been speedrunning life to get to college at the age of 16, there are some harsh, hard realities that are going to come into play once you’re away from home at college, and I hope they’ve learned enough street smarts and have enough maturity to survive college, and rush to become a miserable adult sooner rather than later.
