As long as I'm not trying to ride the pig's wings to instant stardom

As students at that music conservatory that I love to mock, we never talked about its reputation. We all knew about it- we knew it, the faculty knew it, U.S. News and World Report knew it. But we never felt the need to say it aloud. Of course, it could have had something to with having a deep-rooted sense that if you’re not a child prodigy performing at Carnegie Hall, you’re still not good enough. Or the implicit social rule that serious, cynical artists must reject anything so simple as school spirit. But mostly, it was because talking about it would’ve made us the equivalent to the kid in school that is almost cool, but never gets there because she is trying too hard to prove it.

Now that I’ve been in my current program for the summer term and have been through orientation and the first week of the fall semester, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard in the most explicit of terms that we are in the BEST ADVERTISING PROGRAM IN THE COUNTRY. And I’m beginning to have to resist the urge to gasp dramatically each time yet another faculty member says it and say, “What? OMG. I had no. idea. Why didn’t anyone say so?”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m Texan, I’m proud and I will HOOK ‘EM until the day I die. But being proud of your state and your football team is one thing. You know that none of that actually makes you better than anyone else.

And I am remarkably thankful to be in this program and I fully agree that it really is an extremely comprehensive and solid program with relevant classes where people are actually very nice and down-to-earth. I know that they remind us of the reputation over and over again with the hope that it will motivate us to do well. But please. Give us a little credit. I mean, anyone who really does need such educational ego feeding to do well will probably end up as the 55-year-old stuck in a career rut, wondering why the BEST PROGRAM IN THE COUNTRY didn’t catapult him to stardom.

For once, I wish things were a little more like the music conservatory.

Wait, did I really just write that? Was that a pig flying past my window?