Upon opening his Andover Admissions package just a year ago this past March, Dylan Gent ’16 slipped into a brief state of shock as he read of the wealth of alumni accomplishments: Andover Grad Invents Teleportation, Phillips Alumnus is First to Live on Jupiter, Obama Offers His Presidency to Current Academy Student, and others. From that moment on, Gent, with no particular skills and extremely average intelligence to work with, began laboring tirelessly on the most impressive project he could come up with: discovering Atlantis. Hesitant to reveal his crazy ambition, Gent copied his peers and claimed to anyone who would listen that he’s done “nothing” over the past two summers.. This, of course, was all to lead them into a false sense of security, to quell any fears they had of being one-upped in their impressiveness. “All of my classmates have been working on secret projects too; they just won’t admit it. I walked into my friend’s dorm room the other day and found blueprints for a self-sufficient, vertical version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” justified Gent. “But I guess they don’t use any power so it’s really just pointless, unlike the Eiffel Tower. That has a HUGE point, super poignant.” However, despite these claims of procrastination, his parents seem to believe otherwise. “We tried pressuring him to sleep late and break his curfew over the summer like normal, way cooler teenagers, but he just locks himself up in his room with a map and a calculator 25 hours a day, eight days a week!” cries Conna Fused, his exhausted mother. “Neighbors called me crying early at three in the morning because they thought [Gent] drowned in the pool, but he was just SNUBA diving around and around in circles.” After he failed to get a real SCUBA diving license, Gent was forced to settle on SNUBA diving, a part-scuba and part-snorkel underwater exploring technique. However, after several years of effort, Gent finally struck gold. Literally, he swam into an ancient gold statue underwater. While SNUBA diving this past spring break off the coast of Djibouti, Gent miraculously discovered the lost underwater city of Atlantis. His hard work has most certainly paid off. Gent has recently been added to the “Top 14 Under 14” from Luxembourg/Uruguay, though nobody really cares. “This is totally typical of the other kids at Andover,” adds an unenthusiastic Gent. “I mean, I’m glad I found it and all, b-=ut it’s not like I made a time machine or anything like my friend Maggie Niphicente ’15.” Gent attributes his totally mediocre success to his advanced SNUBA technique.
