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I admit to overreacting and I sincerely apologize for it. Upon further review (and skipping the first paragraph), he makes a good point. But I do stand by my g

I admit to overreacting and I sincerely apologize for it. Upon further review (and skipping the first paragraph), he makes a good point. But I do stand by my general point that he fell too easily into the insufferable trap of school egotism. I've made it a policy to pretty much just ignore anybody from the moment they start a sentence with "When I went to <insert specific school>...". It could be a top-10 school, or it could be some Tier-3 school. Unless the point is hyper-specific to that school, the school is really immaterial to the point. Coincidentally when a school is named in a sentence like that it's almost always a top-10 US school. This is a common phenomenon for these schools. I did some quick spot checking just to make sure I wasn't suffering from some kind of confirmation bias... According to Google the phrase "What I was at <insert school>" occurs with the following frequencies: School - Google Returns - US News Ranking Harvard - 2,280,000 - 1 Columbia - 1,300,000 - 8 Yale - 976,000 - 3 Stanford - 962,000 - 4 Princeton - 651,000 - 1 MIT - 607,000 - 4 Duke - 553,000 - 10 Brown - 485,000 - 16 Cornell - 418,000 - 15 Compare to Tier-3 schools with large student populations KSU - 91,300 Biola - 56,800 DePaul - 45,200 UVA - 45,600 Some of the schools barely register at all, even reasonably notable ones. I even tried a couple versions of their names to get more results... George Mason University - Which has the largest student population in the state, and is #1 on USNews's list of Up-and-coming National Universities has the #1 public policy school in the nation, and several other top-10 and top-20 schools and programs (Economics, Political Economics, Law and Economics) etc. GMU - 3 George Mason - 4 Old Dominion University - one of only 101 public universities with a Carnegie/Doctoral Research-Extensive distinction, large student population ODU - 10 Old Dominion - 1 Kettering University (formerly GMI) - Ranked consistently as one of the best Engineering Schools in the U.S. Kettering - 7 GMI - 7

andrewljohnson 17y ago
The college I went to beats all of those on the same Google search. Does that mean I went to school with a bunch of snobs who thought they were better than they are :(
- elblanco 17y ago
  Your school is a top ranked Tier-1 school isn't it? USNews ranks them in the top25. I've also noticed a similar phenomenon among schools with a strong sports program. (Ohio State cough cough). It would be an interesting little research project to come up with a set of typical self-referential statements like my sample one, and go through every school in the country and see where they show up. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that these are not quality schools by any possible stretch of the imagination. But I'd be willing to bet a dollar that the delta between the average Kettering grad and the average MIT grad in the same field is not as high as the ego driven self-referential usage patterns would imply (the average MIT grad is not 80,000x better or more desirable than a Kettering grad). What's usually surprising is how many of these types of statements ("When I was at...") usually end in a completely banal statement that any university student would be able to complete. Yet these statements are made with the kind of breathless urgency that would make the listener assume there was something really special about this particular permutation of a common experience that only a person who attended that school could really appreciate. "When I was at Harvard College just a few years ago, there was never any question among young women that we would have both successful careers and successful families." - Caille Millner - http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/woman/careers_workplace_employment/pns_summers_women_0105.asp http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/woman/careers_workplace_... "When I was at Harvard four years ago, two of my roommates campaigned for George W. Bush..." - Aaron Greenspan - http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=18 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=18 "I told her that, when I was at Harvard in my Freshman year, I played football but I broke my wrist mid-season (true) but it still bothers me (false)." - John Vincent "Brother" Quinlan, Jr. - http://www.currentobituary.com/ShowObit.aspx?id=54113&member_id=23 http://www.currentobituary.com/ShowObit.aspx?id=54113&me... and many many others....

andrewljohnson 17y ago

The college I went to beats all of those on the same Google search. Does that mean I went to school with a bunch of snobs who thought they were better than they are :(

elblanco 17y ago
Your school is a top ranked Tier-1 school isn't it? USNews ranks them in the top25. I've also noticed a similar phenomenon among schools with a strong sports program. (Ohio State cough cough). It would be an interesting little research project to come up with a set of typical self-referential statements like my sample one, and go through every school in the country and see where they show up. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that these are not quality schools by any possible stretch of the imagination. But I'd be willing to bet a dollar that the delta between the average Kettering grad and the average MIT grad in the same field is not as high as the ego driven self-referential usage patterns would imply (the average MIT grad is not 80,000x better or more desirable than a Kettering grad). What's usually surprising is how many of these types of statements ("When I was at...") usually end in a completely banal statement that any university student would be able to complete. Yet these statements are made with the kind of breathless urgency that would make the listener assume there was something really special about this particular permutation of a common experience that only a person who attended that school could really appreciate. "When I was at Harvard College just a few years ago, there was never any question among young women that we would have both successful careers and successful families." - Caille Millner - http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/woman/careers_workplace_employment/pns_summers_women_0105.asp http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/woman/careers_workplace_... "When I was at Harvard four years ago, two of my roommates campaigned for George W. Bush..." - Aaron Greenspan - http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=18 http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=18 "I told her that, when I was at Harvard in my Freshman year, I played football but I broke my wrist mid-season (true) but it still bothers me (false)." - John Vincent "Brother" Quinlan, Jr. - http://www.currentobituary.com/ShowObit.aspx?id=54113&member_id=23 http://www.currentobituary.com/ShowObit.aspx?id=54113&me... and many many others....