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The departmental receptionist once claimed that the only people she personally suspected of being more proud about grad vs. undergrad would be people whose jobs required a specific advanced degree to hold. (The best two examples I can think about where that could be the case are those I gave in the OP, but perhaps some faculty also could feel that way)
I think it depends on the person and how deeply they internalize the *place* they went to school as compared to what they did while there. You used the example of Medical school and how much more important it is compared to Undergrad. My husband is an MD and I can definitively say he doesn't have any connection whatsoever to his Med school. Never had close friendships with any of his classmates, never kept in touch with anyone, couldn't name more than a handful of his professors and anything he gets from them in the mail goes in the trash. For that matter, he also has only a limited connection to his Undergrad institution. He's just not the kind of person who ever immersed himself in the culture of the places he obtained his degrees. To him, the place was always just a means to an end, and the institutions themselves could probably be easily substituted.
If you have a professional degree, it seems it's the people around you that are most interested in where you obtained it. Where one went to Medical or Law schools is highly touted in marketing materials and patients/clients almost always want to know where you obtained those degrees, even though in the case of medicine, medical school is of significantly less importance than your residency and fellowship training (which my husband almost never gets asked about).
Where I grew up, you either went away to college or didn't go. There were no in between choices.
That's my experience as well. Well, I take that back. The only people who did the "commuter" thing were attending the community college the next town over.
Most people went to state schools in the same state, but some of us went outside of the state. Pretty much everyone who did a 4-year degree went away to college.
Neither. 1 medium and 1 top school, but both sold me expensive degrees that weren't very useful. In the end, I learned a whole lot of fascinating yet frivolous stuff while getting myself deep into debt. Nothing to be proud of when you spend 10 years learning 8 languages and don't know the meaning of "capitalization of interest."
If any PhD holder feels more emotionally drawn to their PhD institution, probably they are deeply invested with their discipline, or research topic even, on a personal level...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Texas Ag 93
If you have a professional degree, it seems it's the people around you that are most interested in where you obtained it. Where one went to Medical or Law schools is highly touted in marketing materials and patients/clients almost always want to know where you obtained those degrees, even though in the case of medicine, medical school is of significantly less importance than your residency and fellowship training (which my husband almost never gets asked about).
To be fair, patients assume all residencies in a given specialty would meet certain standards or else the physician wouldn't be able to practice said specialty at all. Or it could be that the in-specialty prestige of residencies is a lot more obscure if it wasn't highly homogeneous. It is true that, in terms of contribution to their practice, the residency far outweighs the importance of the MD itself for any given physician.
However the life of a medical resident usually forms a rather stark contrast to that of the life in a MD program. Then again I know very little about the lifestyle in med school vs. residency but every medical resident I know all said that they felt the shock in lifestyle between med school vs. residency, and med school was the more romanticizable of the two to most. Hence I would have found plausible that a medical doctor would feel the nostalgia of med school more than undergrad or residency.
I'm most proud of my undergrad. I was the first in my family to go to college, and the school was incredibly tough in many ways. It was an incredible time for growth, and represented the greatest challenge of my life at that point. It was a crucible that I overcame, which helped make me what I am today, and opened the door for the great life that I have now.
I also met some extraordinary people during undergrad, who still have a great impact on my life.
Interesting. I feel similarly. I went to a specialized magnet HS school that really catered to my interests and started me down the path to working in health care. I feel like it was my HS that is most responsible for what I chose to do and helped me get my foot in the door.
My high school was also pretty selective, and some of our classmates commuted up to two hours each way, every day, to attend. I believe that attending that school changed the trajectory of my intellectual growth and interests in a positive way.
If my options were narrowed down to my undergrad and grad institutions, I would probably be prouder of my association with grad school. Part of the rationale is that I was as active in grad school (graduate student government, volunteer work, teaching assistant) as I was in undergrad. Additionally, my undergrad's administration was caught up in a financial "scandal" over the last few years, and has done a pretty good job alienating alumni.
Yes, my UG. I think someone else hit on this, but I feel like grad school was a job, while UG was an experience. I feel like the connection in grad school was to my PhD program, not my university, while in UG it was a connection with my university as a whole.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TrafficCory
Nobody cares at all. I have 2 AA's, 2 BA's and an MBA. Nobody has ever, and I mean not once, asked about them. I work in IT and at his point it's about experience and certs.
My degrees are in a box in my basement along with all my meaningless military stuff.
I just went to a basic state school and since their football program sucks nobody says a word.
No one has ever cared about where I went to college or graduate school, or asked to see degrees. They may have been verified with the schools, I don't know. I can't imagine any reason to be proud of the schools I went to. They were simply the best that I could afford at the time of those I was accepted to. Neither was known for any great sports teams, in fact I never attended any games at either. We did recently have the occasion to see our local University of Washington team beat my graduate school alma mater in a non-conference football game.
Yes, my UG. I think someone else hit on this, but I feel like grad school was a job, while UG was an experience. I feel like the connection in grad school was to my PhD program, not my university, while in UG it was a connection with my university as a whole.
I agree here.
I'm pleased with the quality of the PhD program I went through, and I'll identify with it but not with the university as a whole. Part of this probably comes from feeling superior to the undergrads, which is probably true at most schools. The undergrads start to look like little kids by the time you're close to the end of your PhD!
My undergrad school was perhaps not quite as influential in the areas of life I currently find most important, but that's because I was already a lot more focused when I was in grad school than when I was an undergrad. Also, math doesn't really get going until grad level, anyway; I never felt at all competent until I passed my qualifying exams. Plus, in grad school, I settled down and started a family.
Undergrad was a more volatile time. I was still transitioning away from childhood, and I had a lot of growing I needed to do. There were many subjects about which I knew relatively little, and I did my best to learn about them while I was there. I got the broadest education I could. I feel that made me a better person, and it left me feeling connected to a much larger portion of the university than grad school did.
I'll put it this way. I spent more time in grad school than I did in undergrad, but I came away only knowing the names of a half dozen buildings on the campus, I didn't know anyone outside of my department (and didn't care to, really), I never attended a sporting even or even rooted for the school's team, and I didn't get involved in anything outside of my work. It wasn't much like school.
Meanwhile, during undergrad, I had classes in all of the major buildings, I held jobs in two of them, I lived in one, I had friends in most of the other student buildings, and I had at least something to do with most of the remaining buildings. The place was a home for me, not just a place to which I drove each morning for work.
Furthermore, the sense of scale during undergrad was a bit off. Yes, I spent my years preparing for what would happen next, but it never really felt like a transition into the rest of my life. It was a sort of self-contained world. It felt larger than life, partly because it was my first time away from my family. Grad school felt smaller because it was just part of life, even though the work consumed more of my time.
Grad school was more work, and it really determined how the rest of my life would go, but undergrad held a lot more memories, and I'll always remember it more fondly.
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Undergrad
