“Good luck on finals,” wrote Amanda Kim, posting on her sister’s MySpace Web site last week.

For the average Stanford student, such a post might elicit a quick thank you.

But Azia Kim, who was revealed by The Daily yesterday to be an imposter in campus dorms for eight months (http://stanforddaily.com/article/2007/5/24/imposterCaught), evidently had more important things to worry about than finals.

And now that Kim’s story is out, Stanford students are struggling to come to grips with the reality that the person down the hall may not be who she says she is.

It all started to unravel for Kim when the Okada dorm staff decided to make a yearbook. The woman had been living in Room 108 since the beginning of spring quarter, and they wanted to make sure she had a space in the memory book.

But the staff soon realized that they didn’t have any information about her — like the fact that she graduated from Fullerton, Calif.’s Troy High School last June or the fact that her high school classmates thought she would be attending a community college and then transferring to UC-Berkeley.

That’s when one staff member started to ask tough questions. And then the jig was up for the 18-year-old squatter.

Media poured onto campus, as Kim retreated from an uncle’s house in San Jose to her parents’ home in the Los Angeles area, according to Okada residents. The questions on everybody’s mind: How and why did she do it?

In exclusive interviews with a number of Kim’s high school colleagues, The Daily has learned intimate details about Kim’s character, the perceived pressure placed on students in her competitive high school and how she deceived both her friends and parents from the very beginning.

Students React

At a 25-minute meeting for Okada residents in the dorm’s lounge last night at 9:30 p.m., staff reportedly said that Kim had a Stanford student identification card, which some speculated she got during a summer program on the Farm. The meeting was closed to the press, but a male resident who attended the session shared the information revealed by the RAs on the condition of anonymity.

“They told us the mechanics of how she got in and how she worked through the systems,” he said. “The staff went into how a lot of it was luck, how she’d been extremely lucky at working the system.”

John Giammalva, the residence dean of Wilbur and Stern, was given the task of notifying Kim’s parents that their daughter was living a lie, according to students familiar with the series of events put in motion on Monday.

“The parents were completely in the dark,” said the Okada resident who attended last night’s meeting. “Where did they think their $50,000 a year was going?”

In Kimball, where Kim lived for two quarters — often sleeping in the lounge and eating in the dining halls — the woman’s closest friends shut themselves off. And in Okada, where Kim often climbed through the window of Room 108 to get to her belongings, residential staff advised residents not to talk to outsiders.

Across the University, Residential Education and Stanford Housing officials were specifically instructed to direct their comments toward an official University spokesperson and, in the dorms, resident fellows were asked to remain mute about any information they received.

Some students, however, were angered by what they perceived to be the University’s silence.

“This shows the incompetence of the system,” said Mikael Solomon ‘09, an Okada resident. “I’m disappointed at Housing and the administration for letting this go on for so long.”

University Response

“We, as an institution, have an obligation to ensure that this never happens again,” Vice Provost for Student Affairs Greg Boardman told a group of reporters in a press conference yesterday.

Administrators acknowledged that the Stanford community was shocked by the news.

“Our students tend to be extremely trusting and very caring,” said University spokesperson Kate Chesley.

While Boardman and Chesley would not comment on the specifics of the ongoing police investigation or the University’s own internal inquiry into Kim’s duplicitous actions over the last eight months, Boardman told The Daily that the University is not considering implementing any kind of lockdown of the school at this point.

The Roots of Deceit

Just like the students on campus that she befriended, Kim’s high school classmates say they were completely shocked to hear the news.

“She was probably one of the last people I would expect this to come from,” said a classmate of Kim’s who now attends a University of California school. “Out of all my friends, I would have to rate Kim as one of the sweetest and nicest people I know.”

Described by several of her colleagues as deeply religious, Kim appeared to be a healthy and friendly high school student. Van said that Kim appeared to have a close-knit family.

“It seemed like she had a good relationship with her parents, especially her mom,” he said. “She was telling me that, when she was at Stanford this past year, she missed home and missed her family so much.”

Yet to some of those who knew her, Kim’s academic performance was less than exceptional. A friend of Kim’s who attends one of the nation’s top schools and who was granted anonymity by The Daily because of the closeness of his friendship with the subject, said that many students at Troy did not expect Kim to be accepted into Stanford. In fact, he said most thought she would be headed to UC-Berkeley’s Spring Extension program.

“Azia wasn’t the strongest student,” he said. “The fact that she was at Stanford was surprising to everybody. She just didn’t have the spectacular grades or extracurriculars.”

Kim’s classmate, who now attends a UC school, echoed similar sentiments, describing that few predicted that Kim would have been accepted to Stanford.

“You know two years in advance that this kid is going to end up at Harvard, being regarded as being the top of your class,” he said. “Azia wasn’t one of those. I don’t think anyone would say that. But there’s a whole bunch of us kids, on the fringe of getting into Cal or Stanford.”

The first time, in fact, that most of Kim’s high school colleagues found out that Kim was attending Stanford was during winter break, after the fall quarter of classes had ended.

“During winter break, she told a lot of her close friends that she was going to Stanford, and they accepted it,” the student told The Daily late last night. “The news then spread quickly among her Troy classmates.”

All of the students who spoke with The Daily stressed that the pressures at Troy High School and perhaps family circumstances could have pushed Kim to keep up the guise.

“Honestly, my best guess would be something like peer or family pressure or everyone at Troy excelling and doing so well — I guess she thought she needed to perform just as well,” said a high school friend of Kim’s who currently attends an elite private college in Southern California. “It just seemed like she should have gotten into a school on par with so many Troy people.”

Mental Health

Denise Clark Pope, a lecturer in the School of Education whose research has focused on mental health and stress in high school and college students, cited parental pressure as one reason a student might decide to pose as an admitted student at Stanford.

“One is parental expectations and the real misconception about the fact that where you go to school does not make as big a difference — if any — as people think it does,” she said. “People could feel they wouldn’t be loved or would feel shunned because of a college rejection.”

Pope noted similarities between Kim’s decision to pose as a Stanford student and the tendency of today’s high school students to cheat their way into prestigious colleges.

“We have so many kids now who cheat their way through high school and who get away with it,” she said. “This is another form of cheating. It’s incredibly sad when someone feels compelled to do this. They need help.”

Pope also said she knew of a young man who posed as a UC-Berkeley student 20 years ago for similar reasons.

“For him it was parental pressure,” she said. “He didn’t have the guts to tell his parents he didn’t get in and so he lied and said he did.”

“This kid was feeling so much pressure that he had to make up this horrible lie,” she added. “At one point he almost convinced himself.”

The Final Days

On May 17, four days before residential staff would discover the truth, Kim posted a message on her newly-created Xanga account.

“I get too caught up in looking forward to summer and going home,” she wrote, “that I forget to be thankful for the beautiful people God has placed into my life. I love Stanford.”

— Andrea Fuller, Lia Hardin, James Hohmann, and Daniel Novinson contributed to this report.

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If you have any information related to this story, please contact Daniel Novinson at dannovi@stanford.edu.

Copyright The Stanford Daily 2007. All rights reserved.