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It's not that San Diegans don't know about Yale. They just don't care

By Hannah Shearer

July 3, 2006

San Diego--When people in San Diego ask where I go to college, the answer, “Yale,” has produced every reaction, from a blank stare to a high five and a free sandwich. (Thank you, Subway on Torrey Pines Road!) However, the blank stare is far more common. A friend of mine swears that when he told his mother over the telephone where I was going to college, she kept asking, “Why is she going to yell?”

It’s true: Many people in San Diego are only vaguely familiar with Yale University and its surrounding city of New Haven, Connecticut. Then again, 48% of Americans cannot locate the state of Mississippi on a map, and who’s to say that Yale is more important?

Still, it was disconcerting to realize that by going away to college, I had disappeared into some kind of snowy void and all but stopped existing to fellow San Diegans.

Back in California––after spending a couple of sunscreen-less days outside so people would stop assuming I was the victim of a tragic skin bleaching accident––I decided to find out what San Diegans really thought about Yale. Specifically, I decided to find out what drunk people in San Diego thought about Yale, because sober people sometimes get annoyed when you trap them into saying something stupid and then make fun of them for it.

Naturally, I headed to Pacific Beach, hoping to bum my way inside some bars using my status as a “reporter.” I ended up just skulking around Moondoggies, roping the 21-and-up crowd as they made their way out. (Say what you will about New Haven—at least its bars don’t discriminate against the underaged.)

I accosted a blonde girl whose zip-up sweatshirt read “USD” on the back. Could she ever see herself transferring to a college on the East Coast? She looked at me as if I had just suggested that she shave her head and start practicing Hare Krishna. “Uh, I don’t think I could do that. It’s too cold there,” she answered.

Her friend jumped in helpfully: “Everyone I know from the East Coast is fat and funny-looking.” This is somewhat accurate, but at least the fat, funny-looking people of Yale hide their extra rolls of skin and physical deformities under winter coats instead of smearing them with tanning lotion and squeezing them into miniature bathing suits.

The next guy I talked to interrogated me. “Do you go to Yale?” he asked suspiciously. I told him yes, and he added, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I don’t really know anything about it.” When I asked him how he would describe the typical Yale student, he started listing things. “George Bush. Skull and Bones. Hey, do you guys really jack off inside coffins?” (Yes.)

Hoping he’d be willing to discuss politics instead of masturbation, I asked him if he knew that Yale had accepted former Taliban member Sayed Ramatullah Hashemi as a non-degree student. He gave a disdainful look. “I guess if they accepted Bush,” he snorted, “they’d accept anyone.” Realizing that this guy was too sober to provide any useful answers, I moved on.

Drunker and far more talkative was a couple in their early twenties. The woman’s sister’s ex-husband had gone to graduate school at Yale, and because apparently Yale is that small town where everybody knows each other, she checked to make sure I didn’t know him. She then revealed, “He was kind of a nerd.”

Her boyfriend chimed in, “If he had gone to a state school the relationship might have turned out better.” He explained that he and his girlfriend had both graduated from San Diego State.

I asked the couple what advice they could offer to Yale students who want to become less nerdy in the eyes of state-schoolers, or salvage their marriages with state-schoolers’ sisters. “I think people at those schools are way too intense,” the girl said. “They just need to chill out.”

Does this mean Yale could be compared with, say, UCSD? “Oh, totally. It’s all the same. Don’t you ever see UCSD kids walking around with their huge backpacks to the library? Just get over yourselves. It’s college. It’s not… I don’t know,” she laughed, “something important.”

And with that they lost interest in the conversation, realizing that the entire subject was unimportant, especially when weighed against the grave matter that is Pacific Beach on a Saturday night. I suppose I can go back to school next year with the satisfaction of knowing it’s not that San Diegans have no idea I exist, it’s just… they don’t care.

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Hannah Shearer is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Vyuz.com