FAQ

The emailing was the quick part—it was the letter that took real work. It took me a while to land on a convincing reason an admissions counselor should mail a shirt to some kid they'd never met. In the end I went with the honest truth: that I was a good student who was genuinely excited about their school. After hours of drafting and revising, I had a version I was happy with. Then I pulled together my target list—about 1,700 schools from the U.S. News rankings—and with the letter and the list in hand, I settled into a rhythm that went something like this:

1. Copy the name of the school off the list and then Google it
2. Memorize the school's web address
3. Put the phrase Admissions@ ahead of the web address
4. Enter the email address into the recipient box
5. Paste the school's name into the greeting of the letter
6. Copy the entire letter and paste it into the body of the email
7. Set "Hello" as the subject
8. Send

At my fastest, I got it down to 14.2 seconds per email.

During the summer of my freshman year I was bored out of my mind, and one night I turned to Google to fix it. That's when I stumbled onto a blog by a guy named Tyler Burns, who wrote about how he, back in high school, had emailed every college and university in the country and ended up with around 800 t-shirts. The way he told it—how he came up with the idea, how he actually pulled it off—grabbed me and sent my imagination running.

His original story used to live online, but the link has since gone dead and I haven't been able to find it anywhere else.

Yes—head over to the Pictures of the Shirts page and you'll see every shirt I received, each labeled with the school that sent it. It's by no means a complete list of schools that give shirts away, though. As I've learned, it comes down to a lot of factors: where you live, how good your letter is, and whether a school happens to have any on hand. The best thing you can do is start sending emails and find out.

When I wrote my letter, I made sure every word of it was completely true. Looking back, that honesty mattered more than any accomplishment or award—it's what convinced admissions officers to send me a shirt. Beyond that, I told them I was excited to continue my education after high school, offered to help promote their school, and mentioned that I was a good student. Then I gave them my address and shirt size so there was nothing standing between me and the mailbox. Honest, short, and to the point—that's the whole recipe.

Exactly. You email them and ask whether they can send you one—that's really all there is to it. The U.S. News list I found had the college names but not their email addresses, which is why I leaned on the trick above to guess them. Building your own list and working through it is easy enough to do.

For about two weeks, I spent three hours a day sending emails. At first it was painfully slow—I'd dig through each school's website hunting for the admissions address, sometimes for ten minutes at a stretch. After a hundred or so, it clicked that nearly every school used the same format: admissions@university.edu. That one realization made everything faster and dropped my average to about thirty seconds an email (twice as fast as Tyler Burns). It kept me busy for a good chunk of those weeks, and honestly it was a blast.

Nearly every email reply I got was a polite explanation of why the school couldn't send a shirt. But don't read too much into the replies—they're no indication of how you'll actually do. Across schools A through F, for instance, only six wrote back saying yes, and yet I ended up with nearly 26 shirts from that same stretch. So don't let the rejection notes get to you. The schools that turn you down usually just can't afford to say yes to everyone, and they're putting their resources where they're needed most.

Definitely. Anyone up for a little adventure can pull this off—all it takes is an email address, some spare time, and a stubborn streak. I've had a couple of friends try it, and one of them came away with 100 shirts. Neither made it through the whole list, though, so consider this your dare: see how far down it you can get.