It was the summer of my freshman year in high school and I was bored out of my mind. One night, deep into surfing the web, I found a blog by a guy named Tyler Burns who had emailed every college in the country asking for a free t-shirt—and gotten hundreds back. I didn't really believe it would work, but I figured there was no harm in trying. So I fired off three or four emails, just to see, and forgot about them.
Then a package showed up at our door. From Ashland University in Ohio came a purple shirt, and I was floored. There was no way, I thought, that a school I'd never set foot in would mail a total stranger a shirt just because he asked. My parents were as amazed as I was. I still remember my dad picking up the envelope, shaking his head, and saying, "No way." That was the moment it stopped being a joke and became a mission.
To do it properly I needed a system. I set up shop in the basement with an Excel sheet listing about 1,700 schools, a formula that stitched each name into a likely admissions address, and a letter I'd spent hours making perfect. For every school I'd copy the name, Google it to make sure it was real and find its site, paste everything into a fresh email, and hit send. Google, find, paste, send. It was tedious as anything—and looking back, a few lines of code could have done the entire thing for me. That realization is a big part of why I study computer science today: I fell in love with just how fast and efficient a computer could be.
At my fastest I could send an email every fourteen seconds. With a return rate of about one in ten, that worked out to roughly two and a half minutes of work per shirt—not bad for a kid in his basement. I'd sit there for hours, half hating it, muttering to myself: almost there, almost there, just finish the list.
The trickle became a flood. The mailman started pulling up with those gray post-office bins, each one full, and simply handing them over—our house had basically turned into a mailroom. Places like LSU, Ohio University, and the University of Nebraska were all pitching in. One afternoon twelve shirts arrived at once. It really was like Christmas in July.
Going that fast, I didn't always check where my emails were landing, which led to some funny exchanges. I once emailed a women's college in Georgia, and being a guy, I laughed at Brenau University's reply:
While our primary undergraduate school is the women's college, we do encourage male students to apply for and attend classes at Brenau. However, the experience may not be the same for you as it would be at a traditional co-ed university.
They didn't send a shirt—but they did send a very nice pen.
Some of what arrived was gloriously weird. The New York Fashion Institute of Technology sent one with "If loving fashion were a crime then I'd plead guilty!" spelled across the back. Another school—I won't name names—mailed a bright yellow V-neck cut so deep it nearly reached my belly button. Paul Quinn College, instead of the adult small I'd asked for, sent an adult XXXL I could have fit three of me into.
With so many shirts, I started giving them away. Some went to Goodwill, some to local charities, and a few got wrapped up as Christmas presents. I kept a spare in my locker for whoever forgot theirs before gym or cross country—"Keep it," I'd tell them, "I've got plenty." My favorite thing I've done with the extras, though, is still in progress: I cut a square out of about thirty of the best ones and started sewing them into a quilt. It isn't finished yet, but when it is I'll have a way to keep the whole adventure wrapped around me for good.
It wasn't only shirts. Colleges that couldn't spare clothing sent other things—thousands of pens and pencils, a flag from Western Michigan University, and, from National American University, an umbrella of all things. The most generous by far was Pace University in New York. It turned out one of their alumni was my neighbor, and once they made the connection they went all out: a t-shirt, a long-sleeve shirt, a sweatshirt, a coffee mug, a notebook, a tin of mints, and a fistful of pens and pencils.
Then came the posters. Stetson University sent one of their rowing team mid-stroke. University of Alaska—Fairbanks sent a six-foot panorama of the Alaskan wilderness. My favorite was from The University of Chicago—an aerial view of their campus, back when I thought that was where I wanted to go. I hung them until the walls ran out, then started on the ceiling. By the time the flow stopped, every inch of my room was wallpapered in college.
Here's the part that still makes me grin. A couple of years later I applied to a lot of those same schools for real, through the Common App—and got into around twenty of them. I hung the acceptance letters up next to all the posters in my room. For a while I liked to claim I was the most heavily recruited student in the Class of 2016. I mean, how many high schoolers are on 1,700 different colleges' mailing lists?
All told, I received 302 free shirts, more than 5,000 pieces of mail, and over 20,000 emails. The mail and emails kept trickling in long after; I just stopped counting back in 2016.
If this whole thing taught me anything, it's that sometimes you just have to ask. Back then I was a shy kid who found social stuff genuinely difficult, and emailing a stranger to ask for something felt scary—the way putting yourself out there always does, whether it's making a friend or asking someone on a date. But I asked anyway, and it worked out better than I ever imagined. That's stayed with me ever since: be willing to ask, even when you're sure it won't work. You never know. There might be 302 t-shirts sitting just around the corner, waiting on a single email.
I never did kick the habit of free stuff, by the way—in college I ran @BYUFreeFood, tracking down every free meal on campus. I could go a whole week without paying for lunch or dinner. Thursdays were by far the best: upwards of ten events in one evening. So much pizza.
Stewart Thompson