Taking Requests

A while ago, I looked in to the Freak Machine Press mail bag--okay, I looked a the comment's section in one of my posts--and found one by old friend and fellow blogger Bret:

I had an idea for an essay for you. Now that you have gotten your Masters at an esteemed Boston University - perhaps you could write about the stigma of going to a state school for under-grad. I have found that it crops up all over the place - social situations, job interviews. You sort of feel like you have to add something to the end of the sentence. I heard they named "The H Bomb" after the silence that follows when someone tells someone that they went to Harvard. Maybe there exists an F-Bomb?

The "F-bomb" Bret mentions refers to Framingham State College, where we both did our undergrad at. And I'm afraid Bret's going to have to look elsewhere for a pure example, on the account that I have a whole other stigma of graduating with an MFA in creative writing. Add on the fact that I still haven't gone into teaching and I'm a pariah to family and friends who wonder why I have an effectively useless degree (workforce wise) as well as to slam/anti-university poets who scoff my "academic" background.

That being said, I'm always a little amazed that people know of my undergrad alma matta's existance. I know it sounds stupid to be amazed that people in my state know about things that are in it, but compared to the press all the big Boston colleges get, the smaller colleges almost get faded out entirely.

I did have the privilege of roomming with someone who graduated from Harvard. Didn't make me feel like I missed out on anything. He is currently AWOL, having escaped creditors and potentially the law a year ago with empty promises to pick up his junk and take care of phone bills (to give you an idea of how that went, we all switched to cell phones). In the process of removing his stuff, we came across his writings--pages of what were supposed to be his graduate level compositions. I thought I had an eighth grade reading level upon entering undergrad. I thought wrong. Either that, or his papers were grade-level five or six.

And they were graded favorably by his teachers!

Big name schools do not make one smarter or better, but they do validate one's prestige and self-importance. And if today's stock of prestiguous, self-important people don't impress you all that much, then you and I didn't miss much, Bret. And we should be glad that the morons we worked side by side with at The Gatepost and elsewhere didn't attend Harvard. Because they didn't, the damage they did was only small scale.

Do I think graduating from big schools are the only way to accomplish big things? No, but I do think that small time fuck-ups graduating from schools like Harvard and Yale can be handed opportunities to created even larger craters than they could by going to Dean or Bridgewater.

And remember: G.W. graduated from Yale and Harvard. How hard can it be?

(P.S. I think a more poignant essay would be how writing standards have lowered incredibly in all educational divisions except English. Any thoughts?)