Katherina Lynn had only been Katherina Lynn for a month before she was expelled from Yale for admissions fraud.
Lynn, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, says that growing up in a Chinese family in Northern California, she always hated her given name. She says she was bullied so much for it that, halfway through her sophomore year of high school, she decided to become someone new. Someone with a Western name and an Ivy League degree who left her detractors in the dust.
That’s how “Katherina Lynn” was born.
Convinced that her chances of success as an Asian kid with average grades were less than ideal in the ultra-competitive Bay Area—for good reason, given the proven anti-Asian bias in Ivy admissions processes, which culminated in a Supreme Court lawsuit penalizing Harvard in 2023—Lynn swapped studying for identity hunting. After careful research, she landed on the 2,000-person town of Tioga, North Dakota, as her escape ticket.
Lynn spent the next few years perfecting her plan to gain admission into an Ivy League college using a completely fabricated identity. “It’s basically just a lot of reading, because I didn’t have outside help from a counselor,” she says.
“I had to learn how to use Adobe from scratch” in order to forge transcripts and financial documents, Lynn says. She wrote her own letters of recommendation and “came up with ways around [colleges’] security measures.”
“If I had not been as careful as I was,” she says, “I would have gotten caught.”
Lynn would not answer questions about whether her parents knew of her fabrications, and avoided going into the specifics of her process when we spoke. The reasons seemed less to do with embarrassment or fear of punishment and instead appeared to be born out of pride and protectiveness—to make sure copycats wouldn’t be able to mimic her tricks of the trade.
“That transcript drove me crazy,” she says.
Katherina from Tioga
On September 22, the Yale Daily News student newspaper reported that a first-year had been removed from campus for falsified application information. The article identified Lynn but provided no personal information beyond her name.
The search for Lynn’s real identity first took me to the Microtel Inn & Suites by Wyndham Tioga, whose address Lynn listed as her place of residence in her application to Yale.
“Unless she’s working on an oil rig, she’s not here,” the innkeeper told me when I called. The registrar at the local Tioga high school, where Lynn claimed to have graduated this past spring, also didn’t recognize her name. When I asked if there might be another school in the area, she laughed before replying succinctly: “No.”
I called the phone number associated with Lynn’s Yale application—a 701 North Dakota area code that pops up with a scam warning, the tell-tale sign of being a Voice over Internet Protocol number, used by call centers and spammers—expecting it to be a dead end.
Instead, Lynn picked up.
Out with the Old, in with the Fabricated
Not only did Katherina have to be created, Lynn tells me when we speak, but all signs of her previous life needed to be wiped.
She missed her Bay Area high-school graduation, in 2024, and begged the school not to read her name during the ceremony, but to no avail: a recording of the principal reading Lynn’s given name is available online, though no one walked up to receive the diploma. And she legally changed her name.
The fall before she graduated, Lynn had applied to another Ivy League university with some fabricated application components, including her made-up name, though she kept her California address. As she expected, she was rejected, solidifying her plan to pretend to be from North Dakota the next time around.
In the fall of 2024, a few months into her post-high-school life studying resources such as Ivy League–admissions podcasts while living at her parents’ house, she applied to Yale as Katherina Lynn from Tioga, North Dakota.
“I wrote about how being from a small town would shape who I am,” she says.
It Worked
Then, in late March, Lynn received the thick letter she’d been dreaming of for years. She’d been accepted to Yale’s graduating class of 2029.
Lynn tells me that the Yale admissions officer assigned to her “said that my application was his favorite, and that I did a really good job of appealing to the admissions office.” She would not comment on how her fall tuition was paid; Yale spokesperson Paul McKinley also declined to comment.
Lynn arrived on Yale’s campus in the middle of August with a single suitcase and a purse.
She had been assigned a small suite of four girls in Old Campus’s Lanman-Wright Hall dorm, known colloquially as L-Dub. The suite comprised a cramped common room and two bedrooms, each only big enough for a set of bunk beds. The door to the suite was decorated with signs featuring the students’ names and hometowns. Hers read, “Katherina Lynn: Tioga, North Dakota.”
When Lynn saw the sign, her stomach dropped. Her plan had been to return to saying that she was from the Bay Area once she got to campus, so that it would be easier to keep her story straight in case she ever let her guard down. “It was just a sticker on a door, and I should have removed it,” she says, “but I had just flown from California on a red-eye and I was so tired and not thinking properly.”
Lynn had spent the past three years making sure every single aspect of her made-up identity was fully accounted for. Now she was coming to the realization that not everything was in her control.
Things unraveled from there.
Lynn claims one of her suite-mates, Sara Bashker, took an immediate dislike to her. “She kept asking me where I was from,” says Lynn. Bashker disagrees, saying, “No, I found her quite nice and friendly for the most part.”
Other rumors started to spread about Lynn, as Bashker and her other suite-mates complained about a mildew smell emanating from Lynn’s room and messes she left behind, including rotten food. “It was this nightmare roommate thing,” a student in the dorm tells me.
Students also complained about Lynn’s long calls to an older boyfriend in California, who students claim was Lynn’s “submissive.” Bashker told the Yale Daily News about Lynn’s “B.D.S.M. relationship” with a man in his 30s, estimating that they spoke to each other for “three to four hours” a day.
“She was trying to put a cage in their room for when her boyfriend visited,” one student tells me. “Sex-slave stuff.”
“That’s just made up,” retorts Lynn, who admits to leaving an apple core and some wet clothes in her room. Lynn also confirmed that she does have an older boyfriend in California with whom she is in a dominant-submissive relationship, but alleges that it was spun into rumors to do with her being a dominatrix: “[Bashker] took a sprinkle of truth and then exaggerated it,” she says, to the point where it was “unrecognizable.”
On Tuesday, September 16, Bashker says she noticed a luggage tag on Lynn’s desk that listed a name she didn’t recognize. “I took a photo and sent it to my [freshman counselor],” she says.
Later that night, while Lynn was in the shower, Bashker says she sneaked back into Lynn’s room and looked through her purse, where she found the ID Lynn had used to fly across the country to Yale a month earlier. The ID listed a California address and the same name she’d seen on the luggage tag. This time, Bashker decided to show it to her college dean.
Lynn was called into Dean Adam Ployd’s office, where she was told her acceptance had been rescinded. A Yale police officer and Head of College Anjelica Gonzalez escorted Lynn back to her dorm room, where she was asked to collect her things. She flew back to California that same day.
“Yale receives thousands of admissions applications each year, and the process relies on the honesty of the applicants and the accuracy of the information that is provided. When it came to the university’s attention that a student misrepresented themselves in their application, the university rescinded their admission as outlined in the admission’s policies. Yale will not be sharing additional details,” says the Yale spokesperson.
Looking back at the incident, Bashker says she’s “actually kind of impressed” with Lynn’s faking her way into Yale. “At the end of the day, you have to recognize game.”
When I ask Lynn, who is back home living with her parents, what she plans to do next, she doesn’t hesitate: “Change my name and start over.”
“I’m a little mad,” she adds, “because I really liked that name.”
Clara Molot is the Investigations Editor at Air Mail
