Cruel Summer
Give Me $40,000 and I Will Traumatize Your Privileged High Schooler.
Attention panicked high schoolers!
We’re only a few months away from the early application deadline at America’s most prestigious universities, which means it’s time to start thinking about your Common App essay!
As all college consultants will tell you, the essay is the heart of the application—your best opportunity to share something personal with admission officers. And in a world where Harvard receives 50,000 applications a year, it better be good!
Which is why right now is the perfect window to put you through something traumatic that can be used as fodder for a compelling essay.
That is where Cruel Summer™ comes in. For the last nine years, my wife Tricia and I have had the pleasure of taking high-achieving students from across the country on a variety of summer adventures that leave them sufficiently scarred and ready to write!
Limited to groups of four so as to preserve the uniqueness of your eventual essays, Cruel Summer™ pushes high school seniors to the brink of physical, emotional, and psychological breakdowns… before ending our special time together with a concentrated 48-hour writing workshop, guaranteeing that you return home with a polished 650-word essay sure to impress even the most hardened Ivy League gatekeeper.
Last year we led three unforgettable trips. In June, we took four students to Death Valley National Park where temperatures topped 123 degrees. Insisting they wouldn’t need water, we embarked on a ten-mile midday hike across the salt flats to a natural spring Tricia and I knew was just a mirage. As the teens started to hallucinate and lose consciousness, we took shelter under a pile of jagged rocks that turned out to be an active rattlesnake den! Once the medi-vac team rehydrated the kids and the anti-venom kicked in, you better believe our students were ready to write. :)
In July, four lucky seniors joined us on a sailing trip from Miami to Haiti with a cargo of humanitarian aid. What they didn’t know was that neither Tricia nor I had any sailing experience and that we had no intention of ever making it to Port-au-Prince. As planned, things quickly devolved until, in the middle of the night with a tropical storm approaching, Tricia and I escaped in a dinghy to a resort in the Dominican Republic, leaving the participants to figure out how to sail to safety. At their lowpoint, one of them even attempted to eat his bunkmate. Now those were some thrilling essays!
In August, we led a group of teenage vegans on a surprise trip inside Chicago’s largest meatpacking plant. The sounds alone were horrifying, but just for fun I pretended to be pulled into one of the factory’s de-boning machines and crawled out the other side covered in blood. I recently heard from one of the students (now at Dartmouth) who said her nightmares still haven’t stopped!
While I can’t share all our plans for this summer, they are guaranteed to be just as traumatic. And in addition to our group trips, thanks to the emerging power of AI, Cruel Summer™ is now able to offer personalized traumas that your parents can set in motion without you having to leave home. Among our current offerings:
Five Years to Live - Using AI-generated lab results and body scans, we will convince you that you will be dead in five years, making your desire to spend the final days of your life at Cornell or Brown that much more of a compelling statement to the admissions office.*
(*Upon admittance, Tricia will pretend to be a doctor who has found a miracle cure for your terminal illness, thus allowing you to fully enjoy your four years.)
Daddy’s On Death Row: For parents willing to go the extra mile, we will create AI-generated crime photos, plant internet articles, and forge court documents to convince you that your father is a soulless murderer whom you will never see again.**
(**This will require your father to vanish for the bulk of your senior year, after which Tricia will pretend to be a lawyer who gets the case thrown out on a technicality just in time for your high school graduation.)
My Great-Great-Great-Great Grandfather Owned Slaves: With the help of an AI-generated family tree, we can now connect any high schooler to a 19th century slaveholder and all the essay-friendly guilt and shame that comes with it.
We know what you’re thinking: “This sounds amazing!”
It is.
Cruel Summer™ packages start at $40,000, which is less than a single semester at any of America’s top schools. And the results speak for themselves, with 80% of our students admitted into their first choice college, 10% admitted into their second choice college, and the final 10% admitted into their local psychiatric hospital for further observation.
So sign up today! Our application portal is now open — and teenage trauma awaits!
Just read it.
Got to the part about “my great-great-great-great grandfather owned slaves” and had to walk outside. Not because I was offended. Because I was laughing in a way my body no longer supports without medical attention.
You’re a sick man. You’ve got the gift. And I say that as someone who once had to pull a 19-year-old intern out of a carbon filter after he tried to climb inside it to “feel what the water feels.”
Proud of you. But not in a normal way. More like the way you feel proud watching a coworker balance three Hardee’s biscuits on a clipboard during an OSHA inspection and not drop a single one.