To her friends in Kimball and Okada, she was Stanford student Azia Kim. But to her comrades in Santa Clara University’s Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) detachment, she was a Private Cadet affectionately nicknamed AK.

Kim — the 18-year-old from Fullerton, Calif. who was revealed by The Daily last Thursday to have been squatting in Stanford dorms since September despite not being affiliated with the University — duped ROTC officials into thinking she was an honor-roll Stanford student for eight months. She took classes on Army tactics and history, received military equipment worth more than $1,000 and even earned official military awards for her top grades at Stanford.

“She was so good at not seeming like she was lying,” said Kim’s ROTC advisor Diana Clough ‘07, a newly-commissioned Army lieutenant who was sworn in by President George W. Bush at the White House just two weeks ago. “Any oddness of hers we just attached to flaky freshmanness.”

Captain Michael Regnier taught Kim, Ally Ha ‘09 and Michael Rice ‘10 a weekly military lab and a weekly class on topics ranging from land navigation training to rifle marksmanship to battle drills. Because of Stanford’s ROTC ban in the 1960s, cadets must commute to other Bay Area schools. Kim excelled in the courses at Santa Clara, particularly wowing her classmates with presentations on Dwight Eisenhower, Robert E. Lee and military values.

“Her presentations were well done and her papers were good,” Rice said. “ROTC is kind of an easy class, but she really tried hard. She had a background display with a video, music and pretty much everything on Eisenhower. She did better in the class than we did.”

Although Kim actively participated in the classes and labs during autumn quarter, she stopped attending labs in the winter and stopped coming to classes altogether in the spring.

“She didn’t go to labs winter quarter,” Clough said. “She said she had class — the irony of ironies.”

Unlike most ROTC cadets, Kim was never officially contracted. She never committed to four years of military service after graduation in exchange for a four-year scholarship to Stanford, perhaps because doing so would have required her to provide the Army with an enrollment verification form and an official transcript.

“She always said that she didn’t want to contract with ROTC because her parents didn’t want her to,” Clough said. “Looking back that would require ROTC to interface with Stanford, so it would have been impossible for her to contract.”

Nonetheless, monetary concerns might have motivated Kim to join ROTC. Cadets said Kim may have affiliated herself with the program in order to explain the lack of a tuition bill to her parents.

“My theory is that she was trying to say she was in the ROTC so her parents would believe that she was never getting her tuition bills,” Rice said.

Clough speculated that Kim may have also joined ROTC out of loneliness.

“A big part of the freshman experience is meeting all the people through the dorm,” Clough said. “I’m sure she couldn’t because she had to keep her secret, so she was probably lonely. Maybe another reason for doing extracurriculars is so you can meet people without exposing your secret.”

But while Kim’s motives for joining ROTC are uncertain, one thing is for sure: She received a lot of military gear. All told, Kim received 22 items — from a bulletproof Kevlar helmet ($200) to military-grade boots ($80) to a full Class A uniform, complete with sports jacket, pants and cap ($250). Clough estimated the value of the items given to Kim somewhere around $1,350 (see chart).

Kim left that equipment in the Kimball dorm’s lounge until it was recovered on Thursday, when Rice learned about Kim’s ruse in The Daily. At that time, he emailed her to ask for the equipment back. In a terse, one-line reply, Kim told him that she had placed the duffel bag of equipment in the corner of the dorm lounge.

“That’s kind of scary because there are a few pieces of really expensive equipment, “ Rice said. “Having that stuff out in the open with lots of small stuff really easy to take is pretty dangerous.”

Police confiscated the equipment and have since returned it to the Army.

Lt. Col. Shari L. Corbett, the commander of Santa Clara’s ROTC detachment, declined to comment for this story.

As a first-year cadet, Kim needed to show academic progress to Clough and to the ROTC. Twice a quarter, she submitted forms to Clough detailing the courses she was taking, her grades and her performance on key papers and tests. Kim showed A’s in Math 42 and Math 51 in addition to A-’s in Econ 1A and Chem 31A. She did report a B in Chem 33, but displayed an A in English and Fiction, an introductory seminar (see chart).

Kim forged an unofficial transcript that matched these forms, a move that fooled ROTC officials. In fact, her grades were so good that Kim received the Dean’s Award, a purple and yellow ribbon for her uniform given to cadets with a grade point average of at least 3.5.

“We thought she was a little odd, if anything, because she studied so much,” Clough said. “A lot of people talk about random things, ‘Blah, blah, blah, Big Game, blah, blah, blah, this social event,’ but if she wasn’t connected to a dorm community, I guess there was nothing to get her excited.”

Her passion for studying notwithstanding, Kim struck most in the ROTC as a normal, well-adjusted freshman.

“I’ve mentored since I’ve been a sophomore, and her responses seemed like everyone else’s,” Clough said. “She wasn’t hyper social — ‘I’m going to be a Dollie,’ — but who is?”

Kim was so convincing in her role that she never aroused suspicion — not even when her fellow cadets almost unintentionally exposed her. Clough and fellow cadet Kevin Boldt ‘07 were driving new cadets to Santa Clara last September when Kim said that Stanford Housing had mistakenly assigned her to the wrong dorm.

“Kevin Boldt said ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if you went to Housing and they said that you weren’t a Stanford student,’” Clough said. “She didn’t even flinch. That just shows her awesomeness — that she was able to move through that situation.”

Ultimately, Clough defended ROTC for not realizing that Kim was an imposter.

“We actually have an excuse for not knowing, unlike everyone else,” Clough said. “She was not a committed member. She was just like one of those guys trying out on a sports team before they make cuts.”

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If you have any information, please email Daniel Novinson at dannovi at stanford.edu and Amit Arora at aarora09 at stanford.edu. All rights reserved.