It’s a ritual as time-honored among teenagers as prom or drinking too much and crashing your parents’ Corolla into the window of a Mexican restaurant—glossy catalogs from colleges arriving by the dozen each spring. Aside from the faint odor of kiwi bubblegum vape smoke, Woodmont College’s catalog, Welcome to Woodmont College, is superficially not unlike the others. But there’s no school quite like Woodmont College (no longer “university” due to a court order). And every page of its catalog is proof of this uniqueness, whether it’s touting the college’s low rate of scorpion infestation or celebrating its faculty’s various facial tattoos. The best part? You can order your own copy of Welcome to Woodmont College and learn for yourself why U.S. News and World Report has hailed the school as “a singular educational experience for young people searching for neglect of the arts and aggression by townies.”
Comedy writers Mike Sacks and Jason Roeder are your guides to Woodmont College—its missteps, its glories, its unsupervised quicksand pits—and we’ll be sharing bonus content from this e-book all week long to help herald its publication.
There’s never been a better time to tell the world about Woodmont College. Our campus is finally disinfected, our skeeviest instructors have been transferred to our international satellite schools, and the toilets in our residence halls now have their own individual handles—say goodbye to the master control flusher atop the ziggurat on the main quad!
But how best to tell the Woodmont story? How best to convince unremarkable students from well-to-do backgrounds that their parents’ money has a home at our institution? Sure, we’ve plastered our name all over the vomit bins at the Competitive Eating Olympiad, as well as on the missile launchers at North Korea’s platinum jubilee military parade. But that’s just branding, and, quite honestly, it feels a little stale. It’s a new day for Woodmont and we needed a fresh way to get the word out about our almost-accredited institution.
Then we realized we didn’t need a public relations department at all; our best mouthpieces are the students who entered Woodmont College and, much to our surprise, were eventually pinched out the other side as graduates.1 So we permanently locked the public relations team out of their offices after a fire drill, and decided to let our proud alumni speak for themselves.
Emma Turpin ’18
“I loved the lack of attention. I was at Woodmont for four years, and not one time did anyone ask a single thing of me except to help track down the provost, who had gotten hooked on PCP again and fled campus with some axes. And it wasn’t just me looking for him; they had the whole student body out there in the swamp.”
Marc Wong ’99
“Sure, the skills I acquired at Woodmont helped me excel in my future career of tying up the judicial system with nuisance lawsuits, but it was the personal connections I made that I cherish most. My first year, I was lucky to meet people from all over the world, although most dropped out due to the infamous ‘Woodmont polyp’ outbreak of ’96. (Or was it the one in ’97? ’98?) Thankfully, many of my professors became personal friends of mine, and to this day, I still see them when they show up at my home semi-nude and sobbing in the middle of the night begging for money.”
Tabitha Douglas ’00
“I’ll never forget the faces of Woodmont, like my sophomore-year roommate, who ran an unlicensed blood bank out of our dorm’s mini-fridge. Or the dean of students, who walked around campus with a stolen Burmese python around his neck. We found out it was stolen when the actual owners confronted him on stage during commencement. It completely upstaged the speech from the showrunner of Dharma and Greg.”
William Shakespeare ’03
“After seventeen years of the annoying jokes about my name, I did some research and found a school where no one would get the reference.”
Jaylen Bailey ’14
“I consider it a privilege to have never been carried away by the enormous hawk that nests atop the Woodmont Interfaith Chapel and Erotic Piercing Mega-Boutique. It did get my roommate, though. RIP, Todd. The school gave me an automatic 4.0 GPA and a loaner iPad for two weeks, however, so that was pretty sweet.”
Milo Dodds ’04
“Woodmont will test you all right. But if you make it through, you’ll be one of the few who can say at a job interview that you can work in total darkness and take a punch from a chimp.”
Carlie Siegel ’19
“When I graduated, a lot of potential employers told me my Woodmont education was ‘worthless’ or ‘an insurmountable barrier to earning a living wage.’ Fortunately for me, as an alumna, I had overnight access to Woodmont’s Career Center. Their VHS library is mostly vintage pornography and stuff I think was stolen directly from Jack in the Box’s HR, but it was really helpful. After all, I was ultimately hired by Woodmont as an adjunct professor and now get paid in half a bowl of uncooked rice each day. Thanks, Woodmont!”
1 Rumors that Woodmont has graduated a dog are false. The animal was detected and expelled midway through its junior year.