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[quote=Anonymous]By which I mean a school that isn't in the top 20 or so universities. For those of us who went to no-name schools and then made successes of ourselves, how have you navigated the world and the surprise/scorn people show when you reveal your alma mater? For me it was worse because I went to a competitive private high school and came from a family where ALL of my cousins went to Ivies or top publics like Michigan-Ann Arbor and UVA. I went to Indiana University, a school nobody outside Indiana knows about or cares about.

I've done well professionally (in my early thirties, married a DH from a similarly-ranked state school) but while people always recognize that I am smart, there is always a comment along the lines of, "You were wasted on that school/you must've been among the smartest kids there/oh, there are successful people from your school?" And sometimes there is downright nastiness. One of my best friends went to Georgetown Law, and when I moved to DC to work (this was a few years ago), she would say things like, "You must find the rent shocking here after your little Midwestern town" (my family is from an affluent New York town originally), and then boast about how the law firm she was going to only hired from the top schools in the country, and so on.

For a long time I have tried to fit in with these people, but I'm getting to the point where I am just very fed up. I'm tired of having to prove that I'm smart after someone in my social circle asks where I went to school, or having relatively make snide comments about my success "despite" coming from a school in flyover country. You would think people would stop caring about your alma mater once you reach middle age, but take it from me that this is not true. I am starting to think I will just have to drop some of my high school friends, since their snobbery has gotten worse with time.[/quote]

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