I actively avoid mentioning my alma mater, but it's always fun when an indian bro is trying to flex and he mentions his college and asks me mine so I answer and his face adopts a priceless crestfallen look.
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In this incidence a friend noticed it happening and she managed to exquisitely dunk on BOTH of us by making fun of his crestfallen look while also saying "but yeah Manish doesn't LOOK that smart so I get it"


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Anyway I really don't like the dynamic where association with an institution automatically confers a measure of merit/skill/intelligence. I went to one of these, internally it's basically late stage meritocracy, and this is *why* these institutions get their reputation.
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When you take "meritocracy" to its limit you get people optimizing for the (arbitrary) measure of merit and nothing else, creating an *extremely* toxic environment that is capable of producing "successful" people because merit and success are cyclic and arbitrary.
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Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time in college and think it was totally worth it. I don't 100% directly attribute my career growth to it (my degree was unrelated), but college was good for me and definitely indirectly helped me get to where I am now.
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(I was also lucky that my department was less susceptible to "late stage meritocracy" than, say, computer science -- I got to have a reasonable college experience)
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So I love my alma mater, but I've also seen what late stage meritocracy *does* to people, and I'm very wary of perpetuating that, even by just passively benefiting from my association with the institution.
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It's not that I'm ashamed of it; I'm proud of it! I could talk your ear off about why I loved going there! But I'll avoid mentioning it because I don't like the dynamics around the act of doing so. I recognize this is a very weird/inconsistent stance to take
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The dynamic of late stage meritocracy isn't just specific to my alma mater; you'll hear similar things from e.g. Harvard grads (especially from minorities).
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There's probably something to be said about the word "alma mater" being problematic in itself. Only ever heard it being used in Anglo contexts; particularly American. Don't think I've ever heard it translated (or used as-is) in Dutch, other than referring to US contexts.
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Replying to @ManishEarth
Haha. Yeah, to me the word implies this weird correlation between "who you are" and "where you studied", which is like quite opposite to the point you were making.
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