A few years back, California cartoonist Jesse Reklaw published Applicant, one of the best one-off ‘zines I’ve run across. Its source material was gathered entirely from a recycling bin near an Ivy League university’s biology department, where he had been scavenging for gently-used magazines to read. Instead, he struck the mother lode of hilarious, heart-rending, ‘zine-worthy finds: hundreds of confidential Ph.D. applicant files from the sixties and seventies, complete with photographs and some very strange, telling and often unflattering remarks written by the students’ former professors and employers.

Having had similar applications of my own pass through many a university department, I’ve always been curious as to what was really said or written about me; this delicious peek into the guts of the Ivory Tower — available in its entirety here — helps satisfy that masochistic urge, at least vicariously.