I took a cab ride through Cambridge (in the UK) this spring. The driver was very proud of his city and kept trying to get me to truly understand the importance of the University. Finally he spit out: ‘It’s like the Harvard of England!’
He then asked ‘Don’t you always wish you’d gone to Harvard?’ Ha ha. Nope.
What’s interesting is that it really does seem to be HARD at MIT (shocking, eh?). There are essentially no soft sciences (there is a Humanities major, but I’ve never personally heard of someone who did it), and the competition is fiiiieerrce. My dad actually tried to drop out as a Freshman, but was talked out of it by a dean or something, who illegally showed him his test scores (I don’t know why these were a secret, it was 1959). He said he cared a little less every year about his grades, and every year they slipped a little more, but every year he felt more sane. He once told me, “it’s actually true to say that 20 years later I had bad dreams about passing classes there.”
There were freakishly brilliant people there, like his buddy Bernie who couldn’t afford to go back to Colombia for the summer, so he stayed at the dorm and read the upcoming calculus book between pingpong games, and tested out of the class. He now designs computer hardware.
My mom went to Washington U (St. Louis, where the met, because my dad got recruited by McDonnell Douglas out of MIT), and she said that for a while after graduating in Nursing, she had to train herself to wake up from bad college dreams by consciously thinking, “NO! I graduated already!”
My professor did the same thing. Well, it wasn’t about deflating egos, just that they couldn’t understand why on earth anybody would not take a job there if it was on offer. In fact, the only thing they had to offer was money, and he wasn’t interested in that.
I wish that were true… if only so many Cornellians hadn’t been rejected by HYP…
Yale grr
Meh. I mentioned obligatory. Hawkeye fans tend to be rabid-I am not one. I’ll vaguely cheer for them, but I usually have no idea where they stand etc. It was over 20 years ago. It’s a football team, etc. (although you sound suspiciously like an Iowa State fan to me… 
).
I sort of do the opposite. I was accepted (almost recruited) to Smith (The Ivy League! For Girls!) straight out of high school, and even got to do their STRIDE program (workstudy in research instead of the kitchen). Pretty hard to do. I went for 2+ years, then left for personal reasons.
I’m also a graduate of the Telluride Associates Summer Program, which accepts about 100 high school juniors for four summer programs, full ride. (There are more programs now, but those weren’t there when I went.) Eight weeks of sitting around talking about books (and having bisexual experiences but YMMV). It’s administered out of Telluride House at Cornell, which I wasn’t quite good enough to get into, but that was partly because I was trying to apply while basking in the rosy glow of the summer program. (More fun than I’d ever had, and I still look back on it very fondly.)
I currently attend community college. Full of people younger than me, many immigrants, etc. I don’t mention my former college (honestly, most people wouldn’t know or care), except to mention going to college “the first time.” Some of the professors know which college I attended, but I don’t make a big deal of it.
I’m bragging in the thread, because I never get a chance to, but in life…I’m just some older chick who’s in all these classes.
I’m guessing it was a misquote of this remark by Samuel Johnson on a contemporary who maintained that there was no difference between virtue and vice.
Oh, and I graduated from Vanderbilt, but never did buy one of those “Harvard of the South” :rolleyes: T-shirts they sold in the campus bookstore.
<aside> We’re near a hospital and I always feel bad for the docs who get paged at church. Mass is one hour at most and we’re ten minutes from the hospital; surely there’s a way for them to have 70 minutes left free??? </aside>
In my group of friends, going to McGill was actually considered a “step down” since they all went to Universities ‘better’ than mine (i.e. ranked higher on the Times ranking). Never mind that there was no way in hell that I would have taken the SATs, so didn’t apply to the same places.
What got them to shut up was when they discovered they truly could not keep up their european drinking habits there, while I am at the only university in the top 25 (acc. to the Times), that is simultaneously in Playboy’s top ten party schools.
Oh yeah.
or no , I beg your pardon, Madam! Clearly you did not read the balance of the post. We Geldings bleed black and gold – and yes I did take Com Skills 101 and 102. My wife (Com Skills 103) and my daughters (pass out) never tire of pointing that out.
The guy who is a bigger pain in the ass than the self-promoting Harvard grad is the self-promoting Harvard grad who actually wears his Phi Beta Kappa key on a big shinny watch chain but who has no pocket watch. We had a couple teachers (professors) like that.
But doesn’t almost everybody have bad dreams about school? Most of the people I know do, and my dad still has them 30+ years after graduating.
Just had one last night. I was at PU, couldn’t find the rooms I needed to go to class/take an exam/fill out some key paperwork. I have variations on that dream probably an average of weekly.
See, I refer to Harvard as “The University of Chicago of the East.”
No, really, one of my best friends at college wanted to make and sell a shirt with the UChicago seal on the front and a Harvard rejection letter on the back. (Copyright issues…sigh…) My rejection letter was not from Harvard but from Cornell, whom I’m actually working for now. I don’t know what that means.
I usually just say I went to school in Chicago, and if pressed, say “University of Chicago.” The name is nondescript to many, but every now and then, someone’s really impressed. I then get all embarrassed and tell them how it took me five years to graduate and I got lousy grades. 
sniff yes, Northwestern, U of Chicago, all fine schools. I tutored students in physics and math at both while attending Illinois Tech.
I am quietly proud of having graduated with honors from Oberlin College. For awhile, its college store sold T-shirts that read, “Harvard: The Oberlin of the East.”
I’m just a lowly PhD student at a school not even ranked on the top universities page, and a 3rd tier US News school (WVU).
Every time a new ranking comes out, I honestly wonder if I made a mistake coming here and if it will ever lead to a decent tenure-track job anywhere.
A friend of mine went to Harvard. She hates mentioning it. She also said she once heard someone talking about MIT compared to some of the engineering programs in California. “No, man, the weather sucks, but MIT is like the Harvard of Bos…crap, wait.”
I go to an incredibly tiny school that no one’s really ever heard of. Like, four hundred students tiny. I’ve relatively recently discovered the joy of saying, “Ah, yes, I’m studying at St. John’s. Not the one in New York, the New Mexico one,” with an air of pretension, just to see people desperately searching to see if they know of it.
Plus, that helps avoid the “Mexico? Wow, so you must speak really good Spanish!” reaction.
Glad to see the snobbery is not confined to University of Michigan campus.
We sell t-shirts that say: ‘‘Harvard: The Michigan of the East.’’
And there is this irritating, perpetual rumor that U of M is on the verge of becoming an ivy league school.
Don’t get me wrong, I know I got a good education. But after a certain point it’s like… come on. A degree is a degree. I don’t consider classes at U of M to be particularly hard, but I do consider them to be particularly thorough and dynamic. But since I’ve never actually been to any other college, I really have no way of making that judgment, do I?
This interests me as well. My husband was rejected from Northwestern, but he got into Michigan. Me, all I ever wanted to do was go to school at Michigan. My ‘‘back-up’’ schools were local state schools, it never even OCCURRED to me to apply to an ivy league. I had my heart set because of my love for Ann Arbor.
But my pride for my school has less to do with some kind of arbitrary value judgment and more to do with my personal feelings and gratitudes regarding all that it taught me. Michigan was always my dream and it was everything I ever hoped it would be.
That’s not necessarily true. It isn’t just the degree. It’s the people, extra curricular activities and career options that you are exposed to. Harvard and any other Boston school teach the same accounting. The same marketing. The difference is that you have access to the Harvard alumni network. Employers come to Harvard specifically because it’s Harvard.
I actually transferred business schools after my second semester because:
Old joke that was popular at BU (of which I am an alum):
A Harvard student and a BU student go into a bathroom to pee. The BU student finishes, zips up, and begins to walk out. The Harvard student calls out [imagine obnoxious blueblood accent]: “At Haaarvard, we’re taught to wash our hands after we urinate.”
The BU student retorts: “At BU, we’re taught not to piss on our hands.”
(Note: FTR, I hate people who don’t wash their hands after pissing. Blech!)