“I remember an applicant who wrote at length about how she panics under pressure, lacks leadership skills, and can’t stand hospitals. It was a medical school application.”

As BuzzFeed's politics lead, my job is to do the doomscrolling for you.

Note: Some responses have been lightly edited for clarity. 

"I called her to make sure we weren't getting trolled. Ten seconds into the call she began panicking and said she doesn't do well with stressful phone calls and hung up. I called later to check up, and she seemed to have recovered. No interview for her, though."

"The idea was to feed them but also do a study in human behavior. This was for Johns Hopkins and...they were not pleased. Haha."

"[I've also read a] story about meeting poor people while on a service trip to South America (a frequent cliche) that ended with tossing soap and pens and pencils to a small child who danced for them, until he cried of gratitude (or perhaps because teenagers were throwing things at him).

Someone else wrote about her school trip to Ireland, where she mentioned staring out at the Pacific Ocean from her hotel."

"The prospective student said nothing about it to anyone and tried to make the essay about their struggle with the experience."

"He wanted to go to college in the States, then move back to Seoul so that he could work and live with his mother."

"She also wrote about how she cured cancer, discovered how to regenerate amputated limbs with stem cells, and reversed gray hair back to its original color. She would also routinely send handwritten addendums to her application with more of her accomplishments to be added to her file. Her letters of recommendation included one from her pastor that said she used to regularly attend his church, but she is no longer following the teachings of the church, so he cannot recommend her for anything in good conscience.

...She had a 132 LSAT score (lowest I've ever seen) so we never had to actually consider her, but I was actually pretty nervous she would show up eventually... I talked to another admissions counselor at a school across the country, and she was doing the same thing to their office, too."