Dear Editor,

Although I did not receive financial aid to attend the EPGY summer program as many of my peers here have, and paid the $4,700 to attend–$4,700 my family saved from not using an air conditioner or heater for the past year or buying entertainment devices such as the Wii or Xbox–my peers and I did not come to Stanford to be called “ungrateful snots” by Mr. Peter McDonald, columnist for The Stanford Daily (“Stanford Becomes an Actual Summer Camp,” July 1). Mr. McDonald appeared to have made his assumption based on the cost of the EPGY program and a couple of children he encountered while riding his scooter. I fail to see how the cost of the program and a small sampling of our summer camp population mean that we are all  “children […] walking around in oversize grown-up clothes.”

I have not seen these individuals Mr. McDonald depicts. Who I have met are a wide variety of children and young adults participating in programs from sports camps to EPGY courses that are impossible to over-generalize. While a few may be ungrateful, many more are not, enough of us not to garner the title “ungrateful snots.” Anyways, though Mr. McDonald is “somewhat jealous of [us],” he is in the enviable position. He is already in Stanford. He has four years at Stanford while his university will not accept most of us participating in EPGY. We have three weeks to have a taste of what he experiences nine months out of the year. In these three weeks, many of us are here to improve ourselves, and such an effort should not be mocked.

Emma Hanashiro
Santa Clarita, Calif.