"I went to school in Boston"

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

I actually went to med school in Boston, but I just use the name or people will assume it’s Harvard and I’m not that smart. We had our own code, though. There are three med schools in Boston. You either went to the med school, the other med school or another med school.

In any case it’s better than my undergraduate college which nobody has ever heard of despite being more than 200 years old, and ranking first in US News among liberal arts colleges and first in Forbes among all undergraduate schools.

82

So did you go to The Other or Another? :slight_smile:

83

Ha, exactly! Of course, when I tell them where I DID go, they’ve generally never heard of it. To which I reply, “But The Fonz went there too!”.

84

Hey, my sister goes to that relatively crappy school! :mad:

:wink:

85

If you’re asked what school you went to, and you say, “I went to school in Boston”, that suggests to me that you went to some school for the… um… mentally challenged, as you apparently can’t understand the meaning of such a simple question.

86

Oberlin? Grinnell? Yellow Springs?

87

My relatively crappy school? Nice! She goes there now? I hope she likes it. I went there <mumble gurble mumble> years ago.

88

Heh, indeed.

So yeah, people generally do have a big reaction when you say you went to a big name school, sometimes bad but usually good. My ex went to Harvard and used the “in Boston” line, and I regularly tell people something like I “went to school in the Bay Area” (Stanford). This actually has worked pretty well since moving to Chicago, since pretty much everyone here went to the same four or five Midwestern schools. They’re usually asking because they want to find out which one, and if you brush it off with “Oh, I went to school back in California” they generally lose interest.

Generally. Just last night, for example, a perfectly fine conversation got derailed when this guy at the bar wouldn’t let my evasive answer go. After relenting with a concrete response, he grilled me about my school for something like ten minutes. Could anything be less interesting? Nobody does this to people who went to Cal State Fullerton. (Do they?)

89

No, I remembered that (although I have in fact met other dopers who went to Princeton). I wasn’t referring to you specifically just making a general observation.

90

I went to the other med school.

As far as undergraduate I went to Williams (which of course nobody mentions because nobody has ever heard of it). I got an excellent education, though.

91

What’s the big deal?

“I went to Harvard.” OK, so you went to Harvard, or MIT or BU or BC or…take your pick. We’ve got lots of 'em.

It’s no big deal to anyone who grew up or lives in the Boston area. Trust me on that. We’ll probably look at you and yawn.

I can understand people from other areas playing around with this phrase, though.

92

I wish I lived in Boston so that I could be cool too. :frowning:

93

Me too. And me too.

If you’re not interested in having a particular conversation about colleges it’s a nice shorthand way to avoid the subject. Some people have a chip on their shoulder about colleges and if you don’t know them well enough to know if they are one of those it’s easier to avoid the subject.

IMO, it has little to do with the alumni, it has all to do with the person you are talking to.

94

Oh, I know. Half the people in the Midwest have never heard of it. I hadn’t ever heard of it until I applied. No one in my family had heard of it. My mother in law urged me to go to Columbia because ''it’s an Ivy League School." My Dad was dissapointed because he’d been looking forward to Penn State football games. In short, nobody that really mattered to me cared that I went to Penn.

I hear Penn State is a great school, though. We had a lot of Penn State grads in my Masters program, and they seemed really enthusiastic. So I guess there are worse schools to be confused for.

95

And another thing. Obviously people all over the country know Princeton or Yale when they hear it, but it wasn’t until I came out to the East Coast that I realized how many awesome schools there are here. Everybody knows somebody who went to some prestigious university. I’ve sort of begun to think of Ivies as just part of a long list of great places to be educated.

96

Yeah… I don’t think that anyone, when talking to people from or in Boston says “I went to school in Boston.” It’s pretty much an elsewhere phenomenon.

97

This. Thank you for articulating what I could not.

98

In Ithaca itself:

“I work at/teach at Cornell.” = “I work at/teach at Cornell.”
“I work at/teach at a college in town.” = “I work at/teach at Ithaca College.”

I don’t dare tell anyone here I graduated from one of the “Big 4” SUNY university centers, lest they think I’m “special.”

99

Color me confused. For those of you who went to Penn, Stanford, Harvard, etc… why did you go there? Didn’t you exert considerable effort to be admitted, enroll, and graduate? I went to one of the “worst” high schools in my state - it’s been closed by the state education agency. I’m very proud of having attended that school, and being an alum of that school. I went to Harvard as well. I’m very proud of that, too. (I mean, it was grad school, so I bitch about it a lot - and it’s got a lot of problems, but I had terrific training there, met some of my best friends in the world there, and otherwise learned a lot there.)

If someone wants to act a fool about any school I went to, well, that’s on them. I’m not going through life catering to others’ insecurities and jealousy, I guess. I did my degrees ethically and with considerable effort, and I certainly didn’t end up there by accident. If I had, or felt I hadn’t worked hard there, maybe I would be cagey about it… but that’s not my experience.

Saying “I went to school in [insert geographical area here]” (unless you went to a small school not well known outside of that particular community) when you know damn well what the school is strikes me as “preemptively arrogant,” because it’s a little presumptive to assume that someone is going to be impressed with your school. I did have a professor who said to me, “Nobody is agnostic about Harvard.” I suppose he’s right, but my general response to people saying, “Wow, you went to Harvard?” is “Yeah, it was a good time, and a good school, but after the first semester anywhere, it’s just school.” I mean, I didn’t walk around slack-jawed during midterms. It was school, just like middle school, high school, and UT-Austin.

I’ve visited enough colleges to know that pretty much every place is special in some way. I was recently at the University of British Columbia, and thought it was a lovely place, with an interesting lore and history. I suspect most folks outside of British Columbia don’t know that, but UBC grads are justifiably proud of their school, as are most grads of other schools.

I have probably had 5% of the people I’ve encountered have a “bad reaction” to Harvard. Seriously, that’s less than I’ve had as a UT grad. “Y’all suck,” “Horns down,” etc. And I’m just as proud being a UT grad as a Harvard grad. Let’s face it, during bowl season or March Madness, there’s not really much to be excited about Crimson-wise (except this year, when Harvard made the tournament)!

100

I went to Harvard, and depending on the conversation, I’ll either say “Harvard” or “in Boston.” It depends on how much of a raft of annoying passive-aggressive little digs I think I’ll have to put up with from the person asking. I usually am pretty good at determining what kind of reaction I’ll get based on the context of the conversation and the person involved.