酱: Massachusetts teenager accepted into numerous colleges, including several Ivy League schools; including Harvard

You can always tell the difference between a #TRYHARD that got into a whole bunch of really good schools and the ones who got into a whole bunch of schools, regardless of quality, because the articles about them won’t bother to talk about an aggregate of scholarship dollars, and just start dropping names of the prestigious schools that the tryhard got into.

In the case of this particular #TRYHARD, he definitely falls into the former, where the boy shot for the moon and got quite a few hits out of it.  Out of his alleged 20-21 college applications he fired out, among the schools that he will not be selecting to attend are Cornell, Brown and Stanford; because he was accepted into Harvard.

It doesn’t sound like Harvard themselves is giving him a free ride, but apparently this #TRYHARD tryharded enough to have been awarded something called a Gates scholarship which completely covers the cost of any four-year college.  The fact that he’s cashing it in on Harvard makes me think of those assholes at Starbucks who wait all year for their free, no-strings attached Starbucks birthday drink, and compete with all the other assholes to see who can get the most ludicrously expensive drink concoction they can get, and they end up walking away with a cup of caffeinated liquid sugar that should’ve been like $72.

Regardless, the #TRYHARD seemed ready for his news story with a joke, that was the perfect mixture of passive-aggressive humblebragging and Chinese dryness in the arena of humor:

I was like, yes, I got into a local school,” Ly said. “My Mom was like, yay, my son got into Harvard and so she was super happy.”

With the best part being his mom’s response and the boy having to explain that she was in fact, “super happy.”

And because a lot of these #TRYHARDs have to sound as insufferably passively arrogant as possible, he had this to say about Stanford:

I was kind of praying they didn’t take me — because then I didn’t want to make the decision,” he said.

Because somewhere in that psyche of his, is probably the oppressed wanderlust that exists from an academic Chinese kid most likely sheltered by his parents under the necessity to excel at whatever it takes to get into Harvard or Yale, and the idea of getting into a prestigious school out west, and getting as far as humanly possible from his family probably was an appealing fantasy for him.

But in the end, the dutiful aZn son wins out, and when it comes to Asian parents, it doesn’t matter if Harvard or Yale are even the best schools in America, their namesake alone is all they need to be able to actually be proud of this #TRYHARD child, so they can endlessly brag to their Chinese peers about how their kid is Harvard bound and that theirs are probably not.