Nerds rule the world! Think about it: tons of the most influential and wealthy people in America like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Warren Buffett are total nerds. You may think brainiacs are all in skyscrapers planning the next big break in technology, but did you know that there are college campuses where the average student is as comfortable talking about quantum physics as the newest Lady Gaga hit? Here are America’s classic nerd schools. Enjoy!
Massachusetts Institue of Technology
MIT students in an Intro to Robotics class had to build robotic arms and accompanying software for their final.
Known as “A Nerd’s Paradise”, there’s no way MIT couldn’t be at the top of this list. Tons of famous nerds went there: Ford Motor honcho William Ford, the guys from “Car Talk” on NPR, 30 astronauts, and 59 Nobel laureates. I mean heck, the World Wide Web was even invented in an MIT lab! This self-proclaimed “nerd reservation” is a place where nerdiness (or love of knowledge, whatever you want to call it) is incredibly unifying. The most popular clubs and societies on campus are computer or technology related. Take, for example, the MITERS (MIT Electronic Research Society), which exists for the sole purpose of creating and building neat stuff out of old materials. Wondering what MIT students do for fun during their downtime? Well, an MIT student’s idea of fun is cramming a semester’s worth of work into three days during the MIT Mystery Hunt, one of the most highly anticipated events of the year. The Mystery Hunt is a competition to see which team can solve a mega-complex puzzle first. After 72 hours of sleepless nights and code-cracking, the winning team gets honored with a prize: more work! They get to spend months devising next year’s hunt. Countless firms and mega companies have been founded by MIT grads. There’s no doubt in my mind that whatever the current students at MIT are fixated on at the moment will change all of our lives again soon.
Carnegie Mellon University
The Carnegie Mellon team wins a bronze at the global “Battle of the Brains” software competition.
Carnegie Mellon is known as the university “where nerds stand tall”. When comedian Bill Cosby spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s 2007’s commencement, he addressed the students simply as, “Uhhh… Nerds”. Cosby went on to say: “The nerds stand tall. I looked it up. Nerd: a prepared person who doesn’t give a damn about the dance.” See the rest of Cosby’s speech here. Students took the jabs in good humor. In fact, Carnegie Mellon students pride themselves in their overall nerdiness. At campus parties, you’ll be as likely to hear students talking about someone’s internship at Google as you are to hear them talking about… I don’t know, what else do CMU students talk about at parties? Tons of famous brainiacs attended the school- some alumni include former General Motors CEO and Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson, the creator of the Java programming language, James Gosling, and pop artist Andy Warhol. The University’s Tepper School of Business and School of Computer Science are considered among the best in the country. Where the nerds stand tall, indeed!
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
The highly successful WPI Combat Robotics Team builds and competes with fighting bots.
Do you celebrate any Nerd Holidays? The students at WPI certainly do. Pi Day is on March 14 (3.14). Students say that the best time to celebrate is at exactly 1:59 because the mathematical constant can be rounded to 3.14159 at five decimal places… Right. I guess that’s to be expected at a school whose most popular majors are Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Engineering. Not surprisingly, one of the most popular clubs on campus is the Combat Robotics Team. WPI has one of the top teams in the entire WORLD! They design, build, and compete unique robots programmed to fight. Even though WPI is a school for brainiacs, they take pride in their sports teams. Most colleges have some sort of majestic, brave, and mighty animal or figure as their sports team mascot. WPI’s football team mascot is an engineer- just goes to show the school’s pride in their students’ general nerdiness. And if you’re still not convinced that WPI deserves a spot on this list, check out their fight song:
E to the x, D-Y D-X, E to the x, D-X.
Cosine, Secant, Tangent, Sine, 3.14159
E-I, Radical, Pi, Fight ‘em, Fight ‘em, WPI!
California Institute of Technology
Caltech students in an advanced physics laboratory.
Do the seniors at your college pull a “senior prank” each year? At Caltech, the seniors vanish from campus on May 21 for one of the school’s oldest traditions, Ditch Day. The seniors leave behind complex, imaginative puzzles, mazes, and other carefully planned-out challenges to occupy the underclassmen. Think of it as a cross between Animal House and a science fair. In fact, Techers are known for their nerdy pranks. They usually target these practical jokes at their rival across the country: MIT. Take, for example, when Caltech arrived on the MIT campus in early September and handed out T-shirts to hundreds of incoming freshmen that said “MIT” on the front and “…because not everyone can go to Caltech” on the back. Caltech is a true nerd’s dream school, where students claim they spend free periods TAing in the chem lab for no reason other than that they love the faint smell of sulfur and prefer cleaning beakers and test tubes to doing dishes at home. Despite Caltech’s small size of 950 undergraduates, 65 alumni have won the National Medal of Science or Technology! Check out this list on the school’s website, describing what exactly makes someone a Caltech nerd.
Our current social structure places so much emphasis on adhering to norms and following the status quo. But that’s just plain boring! Whether you’re a brainiac, hippie, jock, drama queen, band geek, punk, book worm, or fashionista, learn from the students at these bold colleges, and flaunt whatever it is that makes you different. After all, variety is the spice of life, isn’t it?
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#1 by Steve on June 12, 2011 - 9:48 pm
“Pi Day” is hilarious. Perhaps I will celebrate next March 14… Too funny.
#2 by jen on August 16, 2011 - 1:16 pm
WPI is the much nerdier than that post makes it sound. They have weekly board game night and a board game weekend (twice a year) where people stay up all weekend playing games like Archem Horror, Deplomacy, and Riskopoly. A whole bunch of alumni even come back to play. Their opening ceremony involves handing out beenies and “tech bibles” (the name of a book containing traditions and history) to the Freshman. The video game development computer lab has students in it 24-7. Also their Sci-Fi club is a force to be reconed with, and probably the most influential club on campus (it even got the writer of XKCD to come down and give a speach for them once). If that’s not saying something than that fact that the saying “LARPing is the most commonly watched sport on Campus” is known to most students is. On a side note a decent number of WPI students participate in the MIT puzzle hunt, and it’s considered to be quite fun. A bit of nerdy humor that is hard to miss is the large number of academic jokes that show up on T-Shirts sold in the book store, my favorite of which says “fd nrt/v sqrt(-1)”.