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7. Blake Lively, who played Bartleby's crush Monica Moreland, had her sights set on Stanford—until her big brother Eric Lively told her when she was about 16 that she ought to pursue acting.
"And then after a few months of auditioning, I got [Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants]," she told Radio Free Entertainment in 2006. "And all I had to miss were finals, so I went away just for the summer, I did a movie, and I came back like three weeks before my senior year. And I knew that that's what I wanted to do, just because I had such a blast."
Subsequently, she put college on an indefinite hold, as one job led to another. (She briefly tried to attend Columbia part-time while shooting Gossip Girl, but, as she told Vanity Fair in 2017, "This is advice to anyone: when they say, 'We promise, but we can't put it in writing,' there's a reason they can't put it in writing.")
Lively appreciated the message of Accepted, that what might be widely accepted (no pun intended) as the right way to do things isn't what works for everybody. "So many times in school, you get so bogged down by things that you 'have to do' to get into a good college," she explained. "And you end up being so overwhelmed that you don't do a great job at any one thing. You're just like dying and half-doing a million different activities. And...the extracurriculars you have to take have nothing to do with real life experience. Like why, in high school, don't they teach you how to do taxes?"