Or this nugget:
A guy is walking through Harvard Yard and stops a student to ask for directions:
“Excuse me, can you please tell me where the library’s at?”
The student says “Here at Haaaahvahd, we don’t end our sentences with prepositions.”
The guy thinks a moment and responds, “Oh, I’m sorry. Where’s the library at, asshole?”
My wife got to shoot down a prig like this once while studying in Mexico. She went to a 4th of July party at the consulate and some junior staffer was going on about how he went to school in New Haven - obviously too refined to say Yale.
My wife, who is from Connecticut, shot back, “really, I have some friends who went to Southern Connecticut State too.” 
So, to be fair, if you went to an Ivy League, is there an acceptable way of dropping the info, then? It seems like you’re damned if you mention the school by name, and damned if you mention the town (to avoid looking like a “prig.”) I mean, people who go to schools like, say, Southern Illinois or something don’t have to be self-conscious about that fact. They can simply say “Yeah, when I was at Southern we’d go yadda yadda yadda,” and nobody will think anything of it. Go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton and the same sentence is perceived as bragging. Do you just pretend you didn’t go to college? Or do you just mention generically when you were in college?
I just mention generically “When I was in school…” Only occasionally does anyone ask which school. Most of the statements aren’t about the school in particular, but about college days. “Back when I was in school, we didn’t have email or cell phones. We walked around and left notes on each others’ doors.” I can’t remember the last time I made a comment specific to my school.
Same here. “When I was in college, I could bench-press 250 pounds”* is how I usually phrase it. No one cares where I went to college. Employers don’t care; friends don’t care. I barely care anymore.
*this is a lie
People are always impressed when I mention that I went to the University of North Texas, because they know that means I can drink a lot.
I’m impressed because your school’s mascot isn’t even an animal or an ethnic minority. It’s just a color. A mean color.
Agreed…pretty much the only time I do is when I’m talking about sports, and more in the context that I’m a fan of that team…it doesn’t even necessarily have to come up that I’m an alum (although it may be assumed, it’s not necessarily the case).
Why would you want to drop the name in the first place? If I’m sitting around talking about college hijinks while drinking beer with my coworkers, they don’t care where I went to school. If they ask, I’ll tell them (I used to self consciously say “in western New York,” but that invariably led to “what school,” so I gave up), but I won’t bring it up myself. There’s no reason to, and it does indeed (IMO) make you look like a “prig.”
If it’s relevant to the situation, I don’t think anybody will be bothered if you talk about it. When I was applying for my first job and later to graduate school, I shamelessly plugged the fact that I went to Cornell. It helped immeasurably in both cases, and it was expected. In those instances, though, I was trying to prove that I was a better qualified candidate than other people. I tell people who are applying that I went there, and I talk about it in academic settings, but that’s about it.
There are plenty of ways to mention you went to an Ivy without sounding like a prig. I worked for years with a guy who went to Harvard in the early 50s, and he told me all sorts of great stories about it, but never once did he come off with the attitude of superiority. Its just where he went to school.
In my wife’s case, the guy in Mexico was being a pretentious ass, and got caught.
Pshaw. I went to Kent State, the Harvard of Portage County, Ohio. 
[hijack]Well, because. If you want a longer, better reason, here it is: if you don’t want to be disturbed for an hour, get a partner and go to every other weekend. Or ask a colleague to do your rounds for that Sunday. Or give me written parameters so that I can address whatever needs to be addressed. Blanket orders are not acceptable, neither are verbal or phone orders–I want those parameters in your handwriting, tnankyouverymuch. (it has been my experience that those docs who are constantly disturbed are either the control freaks or the inept who cannot write clear orders to save themselves). Usually docs are paged for the following reasons: to get orders for a new admission; to get orders clarified; RN cannot read handwriting; lab/test results back; another MD wants to speak with doc; change in pt’s condition; family or pt want to speak to doc. If you think the average doctor may have anywhere from 4-12 pts in any one hospital at any one time, any of these can have as many as 5 consultants on each pt etc–the pages add up quickly.
That said, the RN needs to be organized and give the doc as much info as s/he can, so as to prevent constant re-pages. But there is no way to guarantee that the doc won’t be disturbed in church. [/hijack]
I almost never mention what uni I went to–I just say “back when I was in college” and people’s eyes start to glaze over. 
Gelding–glad to hear it. Some day I’ll get back to IC. Someday…
They (we?) actually do have an animal mascot in addition to the famed ill-tempered color: the eagle, complete with a big eagle statue in the center of campus that will, should a virgin ever graduate, come to life and fly around the campus until it is shot down by the ROTC.
It makes for dumb hand sign, though. Aggies have the thumbs-up “gig 'em” sign, UT has the devil worship-esque “hook 'em horns” sign, and Texas Tech has the fingerbang make-a-gun-with-your-hand “give 'em the gun,” sign, but trying to make an eagle claw with your hand just looks like you’re having a severe muscle spasm.
Oh, I don’t know about that. There are some things difficult to do with your rat on.
There are two big universities in Cambridge - Harvard and the good one. I never had bad dreams about passing my classes. Though a few years ago, in Tech Review, the Dean of Admissions said that the current class was a lot smarter than mine ('73) but we were more interesting.
I never attended the U of Chicago, but I paid for it for four years. The many references to the place being hell was just like MIT. I have a T-shirt my daughter gave me, that says on the back “University of Chicago. The circle of hell Dante left out.”
<going off humming “We are the Engineers”>
I love those T-shirts.
University of Chicago:
Where fun comes to die.
Where the squirrels are cuter than the girls/guys.
Where the only thing that goes down on you is your GPA.
If it were easy, it’d be your mom.
I went to the “MIT of of the South” for college.
But I’m more fond of the place where I did my graduate work: University of the Nappy Headed Hos.
I sometimes tell people I went to the New York State College of Agriculture in Ithaca (which is part of Cornell). I think being an Ivy-League Aggie is a bit of a hoot.
When the city is the subject of conversation…like Evanston, or Cambridge, for example. Do I say, “oh, I lived up there for four years when I went to school”? Or am I just trying self-consciously to avoid dropping names (for the record, I’ll drop Northwestern in conversations relating to living in Evanston, because I don’t think it’s particularly a big deal. It doesn’t have the name recognition, in my opinion, of places like Harvard or Yale). However, it does come up with Harvard. I went to summer school there, which is no big deal since anyone willing to pay the tuition for class can go, but do people interpret when I say, “Oh, yeah, I spent a couple months up in Cambridge, too. Remember Elsie’s or Pinnochio’s” that I’m being a prig? Am I being overly self-conscious about it? I try not to mention Harvard for exactly not looking like I’m trying to name-drop, but maybe I’m still sounding like I’m purposely avoiding the subject.
I mean, fuck it. If you went to Harvard and its relevant to the conversation because of the place or it’s an otherwise important detail, just mention it
My father-in-law went to MIT and Harvard, but you’ll rarely hear him say it. He’s very easygoing. Me, if someone kept going on about how they went to Hahvahd, I’d be sorely tempted to guide them into saying something really stupid, and then mention how I learned better at Vista Community College and Cal State Hayward, after graduating late from high school.
The older you get, the less often your university crops up in conversation. When I had first got out of New Haven*, I tended not to refer to it unless absolutely necessary, because I didn’t want people to think I was bragging. I’d sometimes just say I studied in the States for a while, and that normally was enough. If the actual university came up naturally in a conversation, so be it, and of course I plugged it when applying for jobs - that’s what it was for.
Other than that, I was too busy getting admitted to the bar to talk about it a lot, and most of the people I was hanging out with were busy doing the same, or starting their other careers, and pretty soon the topics in casual conversations were about house-buying, weddings, kids, and the topics in professional conversations were about what that loony judge did this week, etc.
Nowdays, where I went to university rarely pops up in conversations of any sort, so it’s not much of an issue.
*Euphemism used to avoid referring to what university. Force of habit.