One of my kids’ very good friends is a proud Howard graduate! Great U!
Ursinus - is that like space camp? Why would anyone name a college after a planet?
In central NY, Hamilton College is NOT in Hamilton, but in Clinton. Colgate University, OTOH, is in Hamilton!
@privatebanker You are not done with 4 year ‘Wesleyan’ colleges, most small LACs: Indiana Wesleyan, Nebraska Wesleyan, Kansas Wesleyan, Wesleyan College (GA), Central Wesleyan, Dakota Wesleyan, North Carolina Wesleyan, Iowa Wesleyan, Texas Wesleyan, Virginia Wesleyan, Roberts Wesleyan, Southern Wesleyan, West Virginia Wesleyan!
There are probably more…
@Mwfan1921 Holy smokes. Thanks for the others. Wow that must get difficult to separate if you live near one and went to another
Guess what, @privatebanker It’s not Shipsburg State, lol. Shippensburg. I grew up in PA. After we moved, Juniata came to the hs for a college visit. Kid on the loudspeaker called it Juanita. I was the only one who knew the difference.
I learned a whole lotta colleges by watching the old College Bowl, as a kid. The tv game, not football.
DH spent two years at a now defunct school in Maine. Wouldn’t believe how many times “small college in Maine you wouldn’t know” turned out to be the same school he went to. Even as far off as California.
@lookingforward :-c
I used to work in a department with a lot of men, all of whom were rabid March Madness college basketball fans. While I do enjoy college football, I am less into basketball and as a result I was pretty much left out of most of the office conversations during the season. Since it was the period of time in the 80s when women were advised to “dress for success” (like men) and to try to adapt to male office culture I decided to throw in a remark about how interesting it was that some obscure college in Alaska was so curiously strong in basketball.
Yes it was UConn (I had never actually seen it written, only spoken) and no, I never lived that one down X(
This thread has made me realize that the University of Connecticut’s adoption of “Huskies” as its team name and mascot must have been a deliberate play on the UConn/Yukon pun.
I never thought of that before. I never wondered why they were the Huskies.
I do remember my child holding up a big, glossy fold-out promotional piece she had just received in the mail and deadpanning, “Nothing says ‘commitment to academic excellence’ like a giant picture of a kid wearing a dog suit.”
I’ve never lived this one down: I was a freshman at Michigan (and native of the state) when I learned that Michigan, Michigan State, Michigan Tech, etc. were NOT just different ways of referring to the same school. I thought only one college in Michigan could have “Michigan” in the name.
Things were confusing one spring. Knew that U of Washington was “U dub” because sister’s son had gone there. My son was at UW- meaning Wisconsin- and going to do an REU at the other UW. His cousin on the other side was going to start college at Wash U (St Louis). Discussing those three meant being careful to be clear about which school. When it came time for the T shirt logo for son’s REU he lost out to the rest who wanted merely UW instead of Washington on it. Being purple instead of red wasn’t helpful back in Madison- no one was going to think of the other flagship.
PS- using abbreviations sure is useful instead of needing to write out long names…
Penn/Penn State. Back in the day before internet info access Midwesterners would likely think of U of Penn. as the state flagship since so many here are U of ___. Plus not knowing most of the Ivy league schools (hey- we did know all of the Big Ten ones- and that did NOT include those expansion schools). And no one outside of Ohio would put the “the” in front of that school except derisively. One also learns it is U of M for Minnesota- see it on the highway signs in Minneapolis. Michigan Tech was known in NE Wisconsin- way up there in the UP, isolated and cold/snowy- and yeah, good for engineering. Regarding the lower Michigan schools- that large lake meant they weren’t on the radar for most since it meant going out of the way instead of as the crow flies (although I wonder if crows can fly that far…).
Years ago in a Wisconsin resort area also popular with Chicagoans there was a couple lamenting that their D, interested in music, likely would not get into UW (popular with IL residents). I mentioned she should check out Bloomington instead of Madison, meaning Indiana, because of its good music school. They thought I meant Bloomington, IL, home to a lesser school.
UCSB.
Most other people - “Oh that’s a party school. I bet you were drunk all the time.”
Me - “No, actually it’s a great school and some of us studied our butts off. I got a great education there.”
Them - “U Can Study Buzzed. Haha!”
Me - looks at them like they have 2 heads.
LOL!
Try explaining that McGill University is an English language school in a French speaking city and province.
On a visit to Haverford we saw a student wearing a Harvard sweatshirt. Our guide laughed and said to my daughter, ‘If you come here get used to it.’
Friend’s son goes to Chicago. Others have said they thought he was a smart kid and would have ended up somewhere prestigious.
Anywhere can be unknown in the right context. Back in the Dark Ages, before Rory Gilmore, two Presidents Bush, and The Skulls brought Yale into current popular culture, I had a summer job doing groundskeeping work at a cemetery in my home town, a small city in the Near Midwest with several universities in it, both public and Catholic. One day I was eating my sandwich with one of the regular, union employees, and he decided to have a conversation with me (a rare event).
“You seem like a smart kid. I heard you go to college.”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“A place called ‘Yale’.”
“Yale? I never heard of that. Where is it?”
“New Haven, Connecticut. Like 80 miles from New York City.”
“Connecticut? Jeez, what’s wrong with you that you got to go that far away for college? My brother-in-law got to go to [Local Suburban County] Community College, and believe me, he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. I can’t believe they wouldn’t take you.”
When my D13 was a high school senior, Rice and UC Davis released decisions around the same time. She hadn’t applied to Davis, but she was super-excited to get into Rice. About a dozen kids from her school got into Davis, and there was much celebration. But every time Rice was mentioned, an awkward silence descended.
“Is that a good school?”
“Why is it named after food?”
“Is it an ag school?”
She was aggravated. All I could say was, “When you get there, everybody there will have heard of it.”
Four years later, the name-recognition of Scripps was no better, but at least there wasn’t the food angle.
“It’s in the Claremont Consortium. With Pomona.” [follow flowchart arrow to Cal Poly Pomona subroutine]
JHS’s post reminded me: My daughter was at a summer dance camp between high school and college, headed to Yale. One of the other girls at the dance camp was convinced that Yale was not a real place, just a college on Gilmore Girls.
You can never just say Saint Mary’s…
Close to 20 years ago, I was a summer associate at a big firm in Chicago. This firm, unlike some competitors, hired both from Harvard Law and its peers and from the superstars at local 3rd and 4th tier law schools. A guy from John Marshall Law School told me: “At my school, your school is not like a place where actual humans go. It’s like a Platonic ideal.”
Um…thank you? I don’t mind that he said that, but to this day I’m not sure what the most gracious response would be.
(It’s a big week for John Marshall: https://today.uic.edu/uic-john-marshall-law-school-join-forces-to-create-chicagos-only-public-law-school)