Mario Rocha at GWU

A lot of students have to overcome adversity in order to get to college, but Mario Rocha, who is about to complete his first semester at George Washington University, pretty much has all other students beat: prior to arriving on GWU’s campus, the 30-year-old freshman spent 10 years in prison, having been wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder.

In his Washington Post profile of Rocha, Daniel De Vise writes that Rocha was incarcerated for the murder of Martin Aceves, who shot to death at a Los Angeles house party in 1996, when he was 16 years old. Four years ago, he was found to have been wrongfully convicted. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment.

In the juvenile detention center where he was incarcerated, he began creative writing. He drew the attention of a nun, Sister Janet Harris, who found an attorney to advocate for his release. De Vise writes that Rocha stayed incredibly positive during an excruciatingly slow fight for his release—at one point consoling the attorneys who were prepared to console him when they experienced another setback in court.

After he was released, Rocha was the subject of a lauded documentary, “Mario’s Story.” He currently “is taking courses in physical geography, women’s studies, weight training and the media, along with Introduction to Criminal Justice, a subject to which he presumably needs no introduction.”

Rocha is attending GWU on a scholarship which he accepted with some reluctance.

Not to be flippant, but that must have been one hell of an admissions essay.

Photo from the GW Hatchet

Time to bust out your “Peers Who Are Already More Successful Than I Ever Will Be” list and add the name Catherine Cook (MSB ‘11). She hasn’t even started her sophomore year yet, but Forbes is writing about her and the website she and her two brothers run, MyYearbook.

I’d never heard of it, but apparently it’s pretty big (Compete shows almost 3.5 million hits this month). A quick visit shows that MyYearbook offers tacky graphics, inane quizzes (“What Kind Of Sex Should You Have?“), salacious stories, and the creepy opportunity to “own” other members.

Like Forbes, I think the site’s a little immature. Then again, I’m not the president of a site worth millions.

Naturally, Catherine’s got a MyYearbook profile, complete with annoying twinkling background and more than 50,000 friends. Interestingly, she also has a Facebook. I’m not sure what the guidelines are for social network wunderkinds, but this seems a little strange to me. Maybe she’s just monitoring the competition, though.

You shouldn’t get too depressed, though. Social networking blog Mashable says Catherine’s role in MyYearbook is wildly overblown:

A source who spoke to Catherine recently told Mashable that it’s more of a PR pitch: Catherine is a 4.0 honors student with little free time in between extra-curricular activities, he says, and knows little about the running of the site when questioned. While the teen angle is a great way to promote the site, the force behind it is older brother Geoff, almost 30, who learned that age is a good selling point while garnering press coverage for a startup in his freshman years. Now too old to play that card, his younger siblings have been thrust in front of the cameras, says our source.

Hmm! Between that and the site’s code (outsourced to Mumbai), how much has Catherine actually done for the site, besides be interviewed?