What’s with All of These Club Rejections? Don’t They Know Who My Dad Is?

By Bryce Hanson and Josh Linett

I’m a simple man. Give me the finest room in Rothschild, unlimited Rand cookies, the workload of an HOD major with the prestige of biomedical engineering, a villa on the white-sand beaches of Radnor Lake, a scooter made by Ferrari that I stole from the football player down the hall, a math econ double major to defraud my taxes, and I’ll be good to go. I really don’t need much.

So needless to say, I was shocked when I got rejected by all the clubs I applied to. It was a feeling worse than when my father refused to let me use the Gulfstream G650 for my senior trip to the Maldives and forced me to take the Lear (which is basically flying commercial).

I guess I can see how I didn’t get into SCNO and AKPsi; they’re pretty competitive. And yeah, maybe my resume wasn’t really tailored toward Change++. But I didn’t even realize that the board game org had cuts, and I’m pretty sure that the entirety of the bird watching club had it out for me.

Something had to be done. I called my dad. His secretary said he was in a meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan. Something about shorting the Yen and flooding the Gulf Coast yard sale market with below market price handbags. I didn’t follow. So I settled for the second best option: Kingsley Décha, the CFO of my dad’s company. 

Kingsley’s a good man. My father rescued him much like Willy Wonka did to his faithful Oompa Loompas. Except instead of being rescued from Loompaland, Kingsely was rescued from a place much worse: the Chicago branch of J.P. Morgan.

Kingsley flew out his finest people to Nashville. I met the team in their Presidential Suite at the Four Seasons. We drank imported whiskey, toasting to the demise of others, and dined on wagyu beef and bluefin tuna imported from Nova Scotia (I don’t eat domestic commerce). I checked Anchor Link and outsourced discussion posts; they developed a plan. It all went on the company card.

The plan we came up with was simple, but devious. A series of bribes placed strategically that would trickle down through the Vanderbilt administration. I didn’t discriminate. I sprinkled gifts around like I had unlimited resources (I did). Everybody from the first year reps (a book on how to make friends; I figured it would be useful), to Chancellor Diermeier (a chartered boat tour of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico), to my VUceptor (a handwritten note-from an intern at my dad’s company apologizing for skipping Visions) got something. 

Eventually, I started to see the results. Dogs act courteous and playful towards each other at first, but throw a piece of steak into the mix, and see what their friendship becomes. 

Clubs were fawning over me. It became impossible to even get to class without being bombarded by their pleas for me to join their ranks. There were pamphlets thrown at me, ladders put up to my window on the 4th floor to accost me and club members disguised as dining hall workers to spread their propaganda to me as I got food. 

Eventually though, I made my choice. I had to turn them all down. They showed a weakness in their pleas that I wasn’t anticipating. It was inexcusable to a man of my character. I’m a wolf in the jungle. A shark in a school of minnows. An engineering major in an HOD class. I’m better off on my own.