I used to be proud of you.

Then I realized that you cannot even see that the free juice from Peele that you are gulping down is actually me.

I love Iron Mau as much as the next, but it has become wearisome to wonder, each year, which Park Scholar will be selected to best represent our university.

A university that you comprise around 0.67% of.

I love to know that the school I am proud to attend represents not your safety school, but the safety school of your safety school.

A school which represents to you a hypothetical so rarely encountered in reality: what would you do for $100,000?

If you answered “attend a research one public university instead of Duke,” and not “perform fellatio on a hobo,” then congratulations. You’re probably a Park Scholar.

A university which, when talking to your Ivy League friends, must be explained away with the reasoning that it’d be a shame to turn down that much money.

Yet, at the same time, you feel pangs of shame when you remember that you did not get the Morehead. And that your friend at Berkeley met Zuckerberg last week.

I cannot even imagine what you must be going through.

I cannot even imagine what you must be going through, that you consider transferring. That you find our student body so disagreeable that you’d forswear that much money just to get away.

Is it the inchworms? It must be the inchworms.

Or is it us? You laugh at the plebs, while at the same time grimacing in the knowledge that, in most ways, you are one of us.

This relationship is toxic, and you feel trapped in it.

I know, I know. It’s hard to walk with a hundred thousands dollars in your pockets. It’s just that it does look a little bit like strutting.

We drive you away by calling you pretentious, insular, and uninterested in those who are not one of you.

When you feel alienated by everyone who does not share your collective experience as a Park, of course you become insular.

And of course we use that behavior to confirm our preconceived notions about you, and you feel forced to conceal your status as a Park Scholar.

Do Moreheads go through this? Is Harvard that much better than UNC? Perhaps, but perhaps not.

Perhaps it is a peculiarity of the fact that a land grant university with agricultural, rather than liberal education origins has a premier merit scholarship.

We are all at fault in this relationship, but we are all members of the Wolfpack.

So, dearest scions of the Park family, thank you for choosing State and sorry for all of the creationist displays (we know they do not have those up in Cambridge).

Just know, you are our prodigies. But you are also our prodigal sons and daughters. Hail Shibboleth, and welcome back.

As for that Park stipend: don’t spend it all in one place, ya hear?