Traditions, Superstitions, and Vague Superlatives

Parents Forum
1

<p>My D is a HS junior so we are in the midst of the search process - the spring break road trip was six colleges, three states, six days, and 2,000 miles. So far, we have seen eight schools for her and we saw 13 or 14 for my son three years ago (now finishing his sophomore year at William & Mary). </p>

<p>The info sessions and tours can start to blend together, especially when you do them back-to-back in one day and/or several within just a few days. One game I have to make it a little more fun is to listen for several items that are typically communicated by the tour guide. These are:</p>

<p>The Vague, Unsubstantiatable Superlative
In this one, you hear something like "X University's dining hall service was recently rated among the top 5 in the nation by a food services magazine (SUNY-Geneseo)." Or "Our business school has had more graduates go on to careers in pork belly futures than any other school in the Eastern U.S., according to a national magazine (Total Fabrication)." The claim is usually very vague and fuzzy, the originating source never named or even known for sure if you ask, when exactly this happened is unclear, and the immediate source nothing official, usually something heard from another tour guide or from some guy at a party freshman year.</p>

<p>The Superstitions
This is a usually silly but fun and amusing superstition passed down from class to class.<br>
*If you walk through a particular gate before your senior year, you will never graduate (Princeton).
*Before every exam you have to stop by the bust of the founder of the school and rub his nose for good luck, which explains why the poor guy looks like skull with no nose but a very shiny, worn spot where his nose used to be (SUNY-Geneseo).
*A subset are the Romantic Superstitions, such as "If you are with a bf or gf in the gazebo and it starts to rain, you will not end up together (may have the details wrong on this one, but University of Richmond had a beautiful gazebo out on a land bridge across a lake and had some romantic superstition that involved that gazebo)."</p>

<p>The Traditions
There are a lot of these and they help to personalize and make memorable a student's experience, such as:
*Every year in the spring an unknown group or individual steals the weathervane off of the original college building but returns it to its rightful place the night before graduation (Dickinson College - I probably have the details a bit off, but there was it involvied a weathervane that was stolen and returned).
*Someone dresses up in a skeleton costume and wears a top hat and cape and wanders around the campus at random during a certain week of the year and if he enters a classroom, the professor has to let the class out early (Emory).
*A subset are the Romantic Traditions, such as students get to go up in the bell tower of the chapel to pop the question (Duke).</p>

<p>So, this thread is for folks to post their favorite Vague Superlatives, Superstitions, and Traditions, either from your own beloved alma mater or one you visited with your child or that you just know about. </p>

<p>I'll start off:</p>

<p>Vague Superlative:
1. When I was a student at William & Mary, the claim was the Playboy magazine had named Crim Dell and its bridge the "Most Romantic Spot" on any college campus in the country. My son has even heard that one some 25 years later.
2. At Duke, the info session guy told us that Duke's virtual reality room was one of only six in the world while the tour guide told us it was one of only nine in the country. I just thought the variable numbers of how many there are and where they are was amusing.</p>

<p>Superstition:
1. Again from my own college days at William & Mary, if you walk across Crim Dell Bridge with your bf or gf and kiss at the top of the bridge, you will be together forever. If you find you have to break up with that person, you have to walk across backwards three times.</p>

<p>Tradition:
1. You're probably tired of hearing about W&M, but . . . every senior lines up and rings the Wren Building bell on graduation day and then the entire class walks together across campus to the graduation ceremony.</p>

<p>Okay, those are mine. Who's next?</p>

<p>K9Leader</p>

2

<p>If you visit Harvard, please be aware that it is NOT a tradition for students to rub the foot of John Harvard's statue for luck. It is, however, very much a tradition for tipsy freshman males to scale the statue at 4 a.m. to pee on the statue's foot as a rite of passage, so that student tour guides can trick unsuspecting tourists the next morning into rubbing the defiled foot under the guise that it's a student tradition. It's the shiniest brass foot you'll ever see. Gross.</p>

3

<p>Ewwwwwww! I'll file that one in my "things to avoid" file!!!!</p>

4

<p>On our H tour, the student guides did indeed tell us that rubbing John Harvard's foot was good luck for getting admitted to the school. Needless to say, I insisted that that my daughter rub the foot. Now that she knows the truth, she's never quite forgiven me.</p>

5

<p>It's true that drunken undergrads sometimes pee on John Harvard's shiny foot, but it's also true that the janitors wash it down every morning before the beginniing of the tours.</p>

<p>A tradition that I liked was at Wells College in New York - a small LAC that was all-female until going coed in 2005. Anyway, they had a tradition that when all the freshman girls are virgins, then that winter the lake freezes over.</p>

<p>We have a similar tradition here in SoCal: when all the freshman girls at UCLA are virgins, then Hell freezes over.</p>

6

<p>Coureur - You just made me feel a lot better! Maybe now my daughter will be able to look at the statue without shuddering.</p>

7

<p>Yale has a similar shiny foot/statue tradtion. I don't know whether the students also pee on it, but it would not suprise me if they did:</p>

<p>YAM</a> March 1998 - Yale's Tallest Tales</p>

<p>"One of the most striking testaments to the mythmaking powers of tour guides is Theodore Dwight Woolsey's toe. Some time in the last ten years, someone invented a "tradition" of rubbing the toe of the Woolsey statue on the Old Campus for luck, explaining that students employ this practice before exams. Similar traditions exist at many other institutions, but it's difficult to find an alumnus over the age of 30 who has ever heard about President Woolsey's toe. Nevertheless, tour guides spread the story diligently, inviting visitors to give it a try themselves. As a result, the statue, the rest of which is a dull gray-green, has a left toe that has been rubbed shiny, and the story seems for all practical purposes as old as the statue itself."</p>

8

<p>The opposite of the vague superlative was this quote about the food at Carleton: "Yeah, the food is okay, I guess. It's not all that good."
Let's hear it for honesty.</p>

9

<p>Tradition from our Reed tour: Once the last thesis is submitted all the seniors take their drafts, walk from the library through cheering professors and deposit them in a bon-fire. DD1 really liked that idea.</p>

10

<p>Actually, what really happens is quite a bit more colorful.</p>