Yale Georgetown: Where Students Go to Hire Personal Assistants

Personal AssistantLast week, Georgetown sophomore Charley Cooper made national news with a job listing for a personal assistant. He's 20-years old and apparently the whole college affair all too much for him to handle on his own.

According to Vox Populi, the Georgetown Voice's blog, the original as went something like this:

As my PA you will receive an email once a day by 9:00 am with a task list for that day and a time estimate for each task. Important tasks will be bolded on the list and must be done that day (even though everything on the list should theoretically be finished on a daily basis) …

PA example tasks -Organize closet -make bed -Drop off / pick up dry cleaning -Drop me off / pick me up from work -Do laundry -Fill up gas tank -bring car for servicing -schedule appointment for haircut -Pay parking tickets -manage electronic accounts -shopping and running errands -other random tasks.

Needless to say, Georgetown is not in the Ivy League. (And neither is Mr. Cooper.) But when a student does something so god-awful douchey that the Washington Post reports on it, something must be done.

Everyone's favorite Yale student, Aleksey "So Sexy" Veyner, might've done something like this. And Mike Kopko definitely started DormAid, a service that offered maid services to Harvard dorm rooms and pissed off pretty much the entire school. But Georgetown should know better, right?

After the jump, a couple of reasons why not.

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New Matchmaking Society Aims to Provide Future Designer Babies

ivy plusTo those insane enough to still want to date someone from Princeton, Yale, et al. after attending an Ivy, a new, more blatantly bourgeois dating service now caters specifically to those elitist desires. According to their mission statement, the Ivy Plus Society, also referred to as TIPS (we couldn't have come up with a more ironic acronym if we tried) aims at creating "a community of talented, dynamic individuals" with 75% of their members claiming single status. Most likely an attempt to encourage genetically customizing future purebred offspring, the new venture founded by Jennifer Wilde Anderson, Yale '01, that stole Harvard's final club/Princeton's eating club concept targets recent alumni from the Ivies as well as their "plus" counterparts, such as Duke and Berkeley. The seemingly arbitrary qualifications even reach across the pond, with the London School of Economics making the list. Taking a Sex and the City approach to elitism and the dating scene, Ivy Plus assures the hesitant with promises of "fabulous":

[W]e all need a few nights to set the roof on fire and fill-up [sic] a glass or three with a dash of chaos & adventure.

Read the New York Times response after the jump.

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The Derek Zoolander Extracurricular for Kids Who Can’t Read Good

Justine and I Official Picture IIIThe profoundly self-obsessed must be truly profound to catch our attention. Recently, in New Haven, profundity has once again reached a high—or low, depending on how you look at it—in Yale’s Movement for Beauty and Justice. Mission statement: Beautiful people are fucking awesome!

Our society is in a state of crisis. Political and social structures have disregarded the collective implications of our individual actions for too long. We live in a world of inequality, social injustice, and conflict.

We believe that promoting the proliferation, creation, and realization of diverse forms of beauty in the world will unite humanity and lead to a more just society.

Founders Justine Kolata and Ric Hernández ‘11 are pictured to the right. (At least their bunnies, "Beauty" and "Justice," somehow have the good sense to hide their faces.)

The Movement for BJ [our own abbreviation] seems straight out of Elle Woods’s HLS admissions video, but perhaps it's something more?

After the jump, the mission of what should be called The Movement for Butterflies and Pajama Bottoms and Cupcakes and Snugglebumblywumpsies.

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Officials Say Annie Le was Strangled to Death

yalenhpoliceIn the latest update into the case of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student whose body was discovered in the basement of Yale Medical School, officials have confirmed that Le was strangled to death:

According to a spokeswoman for Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner, Wayne Carver, Ms. Le died from 'traumatic asphyxia,' caused by 'neck compression.'

This is a reversal from the statement issued yesterday by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which instead of releasing the cause of Le's death, stated

it would withhold that information indefinitely at the request of prosecutors. At the press conference, Lewis declined to comment on a report in The Hartford Courant that said Le died of asphyxiation.

This admission seems to suggest that the case is proceeding quickly, and is closer to identifying the perpetrator.

Police Identify Person of Interest in Annie Le Case

ray_younglooking_myspace16.jpgPolice have recently identified 24-year-old Raymond Clark as a suspect in the Anne Le murder at Yale. Cops arrived at his apartment in Middletown, Connecticut but did not arrest him, claiming to only have a "person of interest." A lab technician at the lab where Le worked, Clark displayed visible chest marks and also failed a polygraph test. But according to a source close to Clark and his family:

Of course, he had scratches on his arm--from his cat. I know he didn’t do it, but I can’t understand how anybody would do that in the first place and put her in the wall like that. And they would have had to do it at night because certainly nobody could have done it during the day when everybody was looking.

Clark hadn't been seen since last Thursday following the Tuesday disappearance of Le. Le's body was found this weekend in a chute in the basement of the pharmacology research facility on 10 Amistad Street. Yale has since increased security in the surrounding area following the murder. Le's fiancé Jonathan Widawsky, who had been cleared of being a suspect, has been assisting police with their investigation.

Body Found in Basement of Yale Medical School

14yale_650Late this afternoon a woman's body was found in the basement of 10 Amistad Street at Yale Medical School. Based on the wording of Yale President Richard Levin's email to the community, the body is presumably Annie Le, the graduate student and bride-to-be who went missing last Wednesday. Today was to have been her wedding day.

Our hearts go out to Annie Le’s family, fiancé and friends, who must suffer the additional ordeal of waiting for the body to be identified.  I have met again with her family and conveyed to them the deeply felt support of the Yale community.

The body—which was hidden inside of the walls of the same building where Le was last seen—has yet to be officially identified by the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Yesterday, investigators discovered a set of bloody clothes hidden in the ceiling of the Amistad building. Though the clothes did not match the outfit Le had been wearing when entering the building Wednesday morning, police began searching local landfills and an abandoned industrial area in Hartford for evidence.

Le's wedding has been canceled and her fiancé, a student at Columbia, is not a suspect.

Read President Levin's email in full after the jump.

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Harvard Medical School Reinstates Freedom of Speech

Harvard Medical School recently announcedgordonhall that it would loosen its restrictive policies regarding student-media interaction. Called "ill-advised" and "problematic" by Harvard professors themselves, the old policy stated:

All interactions between students and the media should be coordinated with the Office of the Dean of Students and the Office of Public Affairs. This applies to situations in which students are contacted by the media as well as instances in which students may be seeking publicity about a student-related project or program.

Dr. Nancy Oriol, the developer of a guideline that essentially censored HMS students on medical conflicts of interests, continues to insist that the policy's goal was to "help students, rather than limit speech or control what they say on controversial topics."

This comes after HMS came under fire for its dubious approach to medical ethics and suspiciously opportunistic professors, including those who served as paid consultants to drug companies and brushed off questioning students who didn't want to kill their future patients. (HBS is looking less corrupt by the minute.) But in a less than prudent choice of PR action, HMS didn't even bother submitting its conflict of interest policies for review to the American Medical Student Association last year, promptly receiving the very non-Harvard grade F from the board in 2008.

Read more about the irony of Harvard's crappy report card after the jump.

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Got Copy of the “Preseason Scouting Report” Circulating at Yale? Wanna Trade for a Date With a State School Girl?

Yale GateRecently, an email has been circulating around Yale ranking the attractiveness of 53 freshmen women. Titled "The Preseason Scouting Report," it apparently ranks the women by how many beers guys would need to find each girl hot. (Go ahead and park the ambulances in front of Stiles to be on the safe side.)

IvyGate has been trying to track down the elusive email, but sources in New Haven have been hesitant to share the document, citing fear of negative consequences from university administration, who have not yet caught the perpetrator. According to a Yalie:

From: [redacted]@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Do you know where I can get this email?
Date: Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 9:15 PM

Everyone I know who has it knows the author, who has expressed a desire to minimize proliferation at this point.  Less publicity might equal less punishment if/when he/they get caught. The university is pretty pissed because we've had a few very public cases of sexual harassment over the years (google: i love yale sluts) and I think they're gonna crack down on this one.

If any Yalies want to share the misogynistic wealth, email IvyGate at tips@ivygateblog.com.

Yale Grad Student Goes Missing

Annie LeAnnie Le, a graduate student at the Yale School of Medicine, has been missing since Tuesday. Surveillance cameras last spotted Le entering the Amistad Street facility at the medical school where she was a research assistant for associate professor Anton Bennett. Le is supposed to be married on Sunday.

The Yale Daily News describes the 24 year-old student as such:

Le, a 4-foot-11-inch Asian female who has shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes, was last seen wearing a knee-length brown skirt, a bright green short-sleeved T-shirt, brown shoes and a brown necklace.

Curiously, Le had left her purse, cell phone, and other belongings in her lab before leaving. She's carrying only her Yale ID card and does not have access to a car.

Anyone with information about Le's whereabouts should contact the Yale Police Department at (203) 432-4400. We will make any necessary jokes upon her safe return.

New York Observer Declares Douche In for Fall/Winter 2009

poppedGreat news for the guy in lecture who's been blocking everyone else behind him with his eight popped collars--douche is in this season! The New York Observer recently declared Ivy League fashion the trend of this fall, beckoning in a new era of flagrant assholery.

Defining "trad" as an "Ivy League-inflected style that's managed to retain an old-school sensibility without seeming dated or costumelike," writer Joe Pompeo immediately goes on to contradict himself:

Think Oxford button-downs (and that’s real button-downs, meaning collars that button down, not simply dress shirts, to which the term is often misapplied). Natural-shouldered blazers. Flat-front khaki trousers. Loafers. Bow ties, rep ties. Polo shirts in solid colors. Lots of madras plaid. Early Brooks Brothers. New England WASPs. F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Does the sidekick monkey come with the outfit? Read more after the jump.

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