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August 20, 2004 > Opinion > When collegiate name dropping falls flat

When collegiate name dropping falls flat

By Nathan Black | Thresher Editorial Staff

Whenever I’m home — regardless of why or for how long — I always dread one inevitable experience: a long-overdue haircut at the barbershop down the street in Centennial, Colo.

I always get one of three barbers. They’re very nice, but they never remember me from visit to visit, and so they manage to bruise my ego in the same way each time I plop down in one of their chairs.

“So, are you in school?” comes the inevitable question between snips.

“I am.”

“Where at?”

“I go to Rice, in Texas.”

The responses from them have varied, but I think one in particular sums them up: “Rice. I’ve never heard of Rice. Is that an agricultural school?”

I read once that the experience of name-dropping an Ivy League school is better than sex. I used to regret — ever so slightly, in between thoughts of how Rice has holistically bettered me in a way that I believe few of its peers could match — that I had never been able to try this super-sexual experience. For while our school is many wonderful things, it is not well-known in the mainstream (except maybe in Texas).

In high school I axed almost every “name” college in the country from my list. Each had its own tragic flaws in my eyes, and I stand by those decisions. But home from school and getting my obligatory haircut, I sometimes imagined what it would be like to be more widely appreciated for all the ass-busting I had done to get into a selective school — what it would be like to tell my barber that I went to Princeton.

Thanks to a lovely little thing called study abroad, I have now since found out what this “appreciation” feels like. And I have never been happier with my decision to sweat out my undergraduate years in Houston.

Accepted to both the School of Oriental and African Studies and to Oxford University for the coming fall semester, I used reputation as the tie-breaker between two fine schools and two largely comparable history programs. Oxford it was.

Of course, I haven’t been shouting it in the streets. I haven’t used it to start conversations. But it has come up over the course of the summer. When pressed to reveal where I’m “studying abroad in England” — my pat answer to the question of why I’m in Colorado until the end of September — the name has to drop.

The reactions are predictable. The most eye-rolling one came during a job interview at the mall. “Oh, so you’re a scholar!” the manager exclaimed.

It didn’t feel as good as I’d heard.

I don’t feel appreciated when I say the name. I feel like an impostor. Anyone who knows anything about higher education knows there are many roughly equal schools at the top, Rice among them. So I feel guilty being treated as a “scholar” while students at other schools go unnoticed. Now on the other side of the name game, I’m finding the grass isn’t so green.

And, to my great irritation, I sometimes find that when I drop Oxford, the person I’m talking to feels the sudden need to drop another — ostensibly better — school. That’s a rat race I’d rather not run.

So I have learned this summer what could have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn: Not only is the joy of name-dropping unequal to a superior academic experience such as the one Rice offers, but it is also not much of a joy at all. It is more slimy than satisfying.

Needless to say, the twinges of regret are gone. I am glad to be studying abroad at Oxford — which has many distinct advantages besides its name — but I am even happier to be getting my degree from the school that has truly been my perfect match.

Maybe I’ll tell that to the barber the next time around.

Nathan Black is a Lovett College junior and former opinion editor.

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