One More Mommy

Thoughts of a mom and her husband, son, daughter, pets, friends, job (or lack thereof), house, family, trying to be more ecologically aware...

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Fans!

For those of you who didn't go to a large school, you may not be able to understand this at all.

I went the University of Illinois. I've been throwing out the number '36,000' for the number of students for years now, the UIUC website (http://www.uiuc.edu) states that there are 40,360 total: 29,294 undergraduate and 11,066 graduate and professional. Also, there are 374,744 living graduates of the Urbana-Champaign campus.

Which means there are roughly 374,743 people out there that I can say "EYE-ELL-ELL!" to and they will respond with an "EYE-EN-EYE!" Except for the people who are against the Chief. (And don't talk to me about the Chief. Because they were arguing about it in the 80's. They were arguing about it when I started college. And they're still arguing about it now. I. Don't. Care. Anymore.)

I didn't think I was a large school kind of girl when I went to college, I just actually only applied to one school. I mean, U of I had a good engineering program, it was instate and cheap. I was definitely not a school spirit kind of girl when I packed up my stuff and headed to college.

U of I is insular - there really isn't much of anything in the Champaign-Urbana area besides 40,000 other students. And when you're 18? What else do you need anyway? So four (or five and a half) years of being subtley brainwashed by orange brought me into the Illini fold.

U of I is historic - it was founded in 1867. My grandfather attended the UIUC campus for his masters in Chemistry (which I didn't know until I had been there a few years). Our buildings have been reincarnated with different functions through the years. Our campus isn't the prettiest, but they're working really hard at making it nicer. But we have a great Quad.

The U of I is part of the Big Ten Conference, which has eleven schools. And how awesome is that to be part of a conference that can't count? There's Northwestern, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan State, Penn State, Purdue, Wisconsin, and Ohio State. When it comes to college sports, I root for the Illini, then Northwestern, and then the rest of the Big Ten. Anecdotal evidence indicates that many Big Ten alumni feel the same way. We're midwestern, we're nice like that.

I've attended football games at Northwestern, Michigan, Wisconsin, Purdue, and Ohio State. By far, the worst fans were OSU, but they got over losing to us (yes, they lost to the Illini when we were there...) and were friendly at the bars. Overly friendly, one might say. Some Wisconsin fans were actually mean, too, but in general I've found Wisconsin fans good. Surprisingly, though Michigan is generally hated, I had no problems with their fans.

I haven't seen anyone else on their turf, but the MSU fans at last weekend's game were nice! They didn't taunt us much for our sad sad showing... Go Illini!

3 Comments:

Blogger Sara Cahill said...

I've turfed with the MSU fans. Good peeps.

11:17 AM  
Blogger Ticket 4 Two said...

Ha! I went to WSU, known as Wazzu, many, many students as well. Also in a po-dunk town. Ah, the memories.
Thanks for being a sympathy commenter and not saying that I write like a remedial 3rd grader. Which I'm afraid my grammer skills may be hovering at.....

4:42 PM  
Blogger Chrissy said...

LOL on the "Conference that can not count"! I needed a laugh today :-) C

9:46 AM  

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