Will Alex Doonesbury Pick RIT? College Selection on Deadline
Alex Doonsebury is on deadline to pick a college, and RIT is among her favorites. In case you haven’t been following, RIT has been featured three times (October 26 , April 13, May 3) in newspapers across the nation in the comic strip Doonesbury. Alex Doonesbury is narrowing her list of top colleges down to a select few. She’s been accepted by RIT, as well as Cal Tech, Cornell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, MIT and Harvard. Alex is a technology whiz and the daughter of the comic strip’s title character.
RIT would be an excellent choice for Alex, who received a perfect score on her SAT exams, holds five patents and is planning a career in engineering. Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau has said he is using RIT in the comic strip “because it’s one of the premier institutes of technology.”
We orginally blogged about Doonesbury back in October.
In the PR world, you can’t beat this kind of publicity. Doonesbury and Trudeau are legendary. And hey, it doesn’t hurt that he’s married to Jane Pauley
Will RIT be Alex’s final destination? It’s still up in the air, but the most recent strip indicated that RIT and RPI were “fine”, but Alex would prefer to be “near a big city.” Well, she already has dissed Georgetown (Washington) and Harvard (Boston), and Cornell is in Ithaca. Hey, Rochester is a small, big city. Or is it a large medium-sized city?
Stay tuned.
In any event, the fact that RIT is on the list and is in company with the likes of MIT, Harvard, Cal Tech and RPI is great news. We are certainly on the national map in terms of the RIT brand…even if it is a cartoon.
It's good to see RIT get publicity. Once you travel west of the Pennsylvania border, most people get RPI and RIT confused. Here in the Detroit area, I even had one woman ask me where in Rochester, Michigan RIT was located. RIT needs to put itself on the national map, not just the Northeast map. Curiously though, RIT has some international recognition. I'm not sure how that transpired.
Atul: Thanks for commenting. You are right, RIT needs to constantly improve its publicity. We are certainly no University of Michigan. After all, we don't have big time college football to rely on. Hey, but we have D-I hockey (www.ritathletics.com). But you should be proud of your alma mater. We receive about 8,000 news placements per year in media all over the world. More than 50 percent of the undergraduates are now from outside NY state. And we do get good press Coast to Coast. Just check out the University News site (www.rit.edu/news) to see RIT in the news. Forget the lady in Detroit! Ask experts in engineering, imaging science, printing, computing, micro electronics, graphic arts, photograhy and packaging science. Have they heard of RIT? No question. And that's what matters.
Hey, you might try to spell "Rensselaer" right. Though I admit it's a toughie (it's Dutch). -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody (No connection to them or to you; linked here from the Doonesbury page on Slate.)
Thanks for the correx on that. We'll get that fixed. How cool this blog post is featured in Doonesbury's town hall.