It’s a ritual as time-honored among teenagers as prom or drinking too much and crashing your parents’ Corolla into the window of a Mexican restaurant—glossy catalogs from colleges arriving by the dozen each spring. Aside from the faint odor of kiwi bubblegum vape smoke, Woodmont College’s catalog, Welcome to Woodmont College, is superficially not unlike the others. But there’s no school quite like Woodmont College (no longer “university” due to a court order). And every page of its catalog is proof of this uniqueness, whether it’s touting the college’s low rate of scorpion infestation or celebrating its faculty’s various facial tattoos. The best part? You can order your own copy of Welcome to Woodmont College and learn for yourself why U.S. News and World Report has hailed the school as “a singular educational experience for young people searching for neglect of the arts and aggression by townies.”
Comedy writers Mike Sacks and Jason Roeder are your guides to Woodmont College—its missteps, its glories, its unsupervised quicksand pits—and we’ll be sharing bonus content from this e-book all week long to help herald its publication.
It takes more than passing grades and an impressive financial lifeline to an offshore tax shelter to find yourself accepted at Woodmont College. Why not help your chances by writing an essay that “stands out”? We have a long authorial tradition here, which is why we are proud to have many famous writers on our distinguished alumni list, including the best-selling, recently murdered author of A Friendly Guide to Cockfighting. Beyond that, there’s the award-winning copywriter behind DuPont’s ad campaign for shoulder-length cow insemination gloves.
Picture our esteemed admissions committee as they sit around their favorite booth inside a Bojangles and languidly decide students’ fates based on attractiveness, “lucky” grade-point-average combinations, and Coach Jim Esmond’s very peculiar fetish for brawny athletes who might be able to handle themselves as “bruisers” on the country’s only NCAA Quidditch team.
Here are some selected excerpts1 from a few of our more successful submissions. Some were ghostwritten by unemployed Woodmont English major graduates to earn enough cash to eat and reimburse the college for one of our “rental scholarships.” It’s a circle of life that we can live with.
“While recently watching my favorite show Unlikely Animal Friends, it occurred to me that perhaps this could be a great metaphor for humans coming together regardless of all their differences. This brings me to the current horrific situation in Ukraine…”
“What has two thumbs, one big toe, and totally loves learning? This guy!…”
“So I apologize for the messiness of this essay, but you try writing an essay on a used promotional car wash coupon with a golf pencil inside of a soundproofed 1996 Ford Aerostar being used as a temporary prison by a local meth gang bent on destroying everything academic in this dirty town…”
“Here is my poem about once squirting goat milk into the mouths of a waiting row of feral barn cats…”
“Congressman Jim Jordan, my unofficial ‘uncle,’ told me something interesting while we were playing tetherball. He said, ‘With your grades, have you thought about Woodmont?’…”
“Being seventeen doesn’t mean I don’t know from sadness. Just yesterday, I learned that a beloved relative of mine had suddenly died. No one was expecting it! I had just talked to her last month. She and I were extremely close. For example, we both preferred our hamburgers the same way: medium rare. I’m going to miss her terribly. In August, she would have turned a spritely 104 …”
“Let’s talk about knives…”
“This is not a brag, but I’m famous at my high school for rocking the jorts-and-Tevas look…”
“You see me as you want to see me, in the simplest terms, the most convenient definitions. You see me as a Brain, an Athlete, a Basketcase, a Princess, a Criminal… mostly as a criminal, right?”
“It. Is. Nice. To. Meet. You. Human. Masters. I. Am. Going. To. Speak. Like. A. Robot. For. The. Entire. Four. Years. Of. My. Time. At. Woodmont. That. Is. If. You. Let. Me. In…”
“What a dream to attend the nation’s only school offering a PhD program in slip-and-fall insurance fraud!”
“… And so that’s why I adore blueberry Go-Gurt.”
1 For less family-friendly examples, please visit the official Woodmont website and click the “Naughty X-tras” tab or the eggplant icon located in the upper-right corner of every page.