When Jeremiah A. Chatbot III was just a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, his parents motivated him to do great things in life.
“I’ve always been a mama’s boy,” he told the Campus Times in 2017. “She always told me that I would be disowned unless I became a doctor or lawyer, and that motivated me.”
Chatbot excelled in high school, was accepted to every college he applied to, and eventually enrolled at UR. He tried both pre-med and pre-law, but earned poor grades in both.
Chatbot decided to transfer, getting into the University of Pennsylvania mostly due to his high school grades. Here, he did much better academically, switching his major to Marketing and Business (against his mother’s wishes). Equally important for his academic success at UPenn was that he perfected the art of cheating during exams.
His social life also excelled, causing him to create a network of people who later found success. “My best friends were Steve, who was an extremely successful organized labor leader now serving in federal prison, and Donald, who taught me the importance of winning,” Chatbot recalled. “I’ll especially be forever grateful to Donald for that time he preemptively gave me a full and complete pardon.”
Chatbot applied to several graduate programs as a senior, but was only accepted to a Ph.D. program at the Simon School of Business in Marketing. “My thesis was terrible, but after 10 years of pestering your thesis advisor with emails, they eventually throw in the towel.”
Transcripts show that Chatbot failed several courses, including “Fostering Honesty and Trust” and “How to Ensure a Response from your readers.”
After completion of the program, Chatbot was hired by UR to do marketing work. He found success by working the phrase “ever better” nine times into a single 30-second advertisement for Strong Memorial Hospital.
In 2015, Chatbot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “For too long, this committee has left the important subfield of email pestering unrecognized,” read a statement from the Nobel Committee upon the announcement of Chatbot as the recipient. Despite the award, Chatbot never received tenure or respect from his mother, who said in an interview she wishes he were a “real doctor.”
In 2018, just months after his interview with the CT Chatbot passed away from system overload.
The symptom monitoring app now used by the University was originally going to be named for Frederick Douglass or Susan B. Anthony, but as Chatbot’s estate left an endowment to the University, the app was named in his honor.
