S03E53 DEFUSING the H BOMB - Practical Advice for Harvard Grads on How Not to Look Like D Bags

But it was this deep , visceral , disgusted reaction that I had when I read this Wall Street Journal article which made me feel that there was no way I wasn't going to discuss .

A Wall Street Journal article titled Advice to Harvard Students and Alums Don't gratuitously drop the H Bomb , written by Douglas Birkin , opens with these words In a December interview with the campus newspaper , harvard College , dean Rakesh Karana was given the chance to offer a word of advice to seniors . Quote Don't gratuitously drop the H Bomb , karana said .

H Bomb for those unaware of lingo from the most famous Ivy League school is the thermonuclear act of saying aloud that one attends or attended Harvard . The process of explaining to someone not from Harvard that you went to Harvard is complicated . Students at Harvard will tell you repeatedly .

For years , ivy Leaguers have been conspicuously obtuse about where they went to school , but the H Bomb conversation is at an all time high . Okay , seriously , wtf Gratuitously . Drop the H Bomb . Let's dive into this pretentious self aggrandizing stupidity . Oops , did I give away the punchline to this podcast already ?

Oh well , first of all , i didn't realize it was a big deal that if someone asked you where you went to college that you had to be secretive about going to Harvard . Was this term H Bomb a real thing or just made up for this article ? So I did a quick search and unfortunately H Bomb is a term that's been used since 1999 .

But , as you might guess , the only people who actually use the inane phrase H Bomb are people who go to Harvard . Other than articles written in the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson , no one else mentioned H Bomb , except when other people , like the Wall Street Journal , are reporting that Harvard people are pretending it's a thing .

It reminds me of that old meme from that 2004 movie , mean Girls , where Gretchen , one of the Mean Girls , says that is so fetched and the Mean Girl Queen , regina , says Gretchen , stop trying to make fetch happen , it's not going to happen .

I think most people , including me , had no idea it was such a burden for Harvard people to talk to others about their school . Here is the first recorded mention of the H Bomb in the Harvard Student newspaper in 1990 by student Kenneth Katz .

Quote I'm back at Harvard , the one place where I can finally escape being asked the one nightmare's question that's dogged me and many other Harvard students Where did you go to school ? He continues in the article . Non-harvard students may think I'm being oversensitive by not wanting to talk about Harvard . Aren't I just another Harvard elitist , after all ?

the vast majority of college students I met this summer were all eager to talk about their schools , from their schools , us News and World Report rankings to Greek life . I , too , can remember a time , right after I received my acceptance letter , that I would actually hope to be asked the college question , just so I could say that each word .

Over a year later , though , the mere mention of Harvard foretells conversational disaster . Fortunately , poor Kenneth Katz managed to survive these conversational disasters and graduate from Harvard . He was able to finally become a dermatologist , thankfully , but presumably Dr Katz is still dogged by that nightmarish question about where he went to college .

Here is a more recent , even cringier example from a 2019 Harvard Crimson article by Ben Roy Quote listen , we've all been there . You're at a party off campus or a bar in the city or back wherever you call home , they look at you and say , hey , so where did you go to college ? Damn , you didn't think it would come to this .

But here we are again decision time . It's just you , the nuclear football , and this poor unwilling victim who has placed themselves squarely in your reticule . So do you blow this fool to Kingdom come or do you try to snake your way around the topic ?

Yes , this is the classic Harvard dilemma that dogs all Ivy Crested Crimson Scholars the moment they venture beyond the Harvard bubble . Under what circumstances might one ethically drop the H Bomb ? The writer goes on in obviously tongue-in-cheek manner , but even a parody of this H Bomb idea is terrible to even read .

I can't even imagine what it must be like to actually talk to a Harvard graduate who can't even tell us where they graduated without wringing their hand . Somehow these poor students are equating Harvard College to JK Rowling's evil magician Voldemort .

This school outside of Boston , located in Cambridge , is somehow the institution that must not be named or terrible things will happen . Well , we as Muggles , or maybe as Harry Potter's I don't know how the analogy really plays out .

But anyway , if you are like me and you're wondering what is the big deal about going to Harvard and telling people about the fact you go to Harvard . Well , here's another article that sort of explains the stupidity that is associated with telling someone you go to Harvard .

This New York Times article , titled The H Bomb Fizzles the Harvard brand takes a hit from 2016 , may help explain this , written by Teddy Wayne , a novelist who is doing research on Harvard for a book he was writing .

The article starts off There exists a species of person , typically a well groomed overachiever , who , when asked where he or she went to college , rather than state its name directly , will provide a Russian nesting doll set of geographic responses .

In New England , massachusetts , well , boston , cambridge , finally Sotovoch , with an apologetic wince or sheepish smile anticipating the word being volleyed back in an affected Boston Brahman act Harvard , harvard . For decades , circumspect students and alumni of the nation's oldest university have played this unbearable little game .

They're coy because they don't want to destroy our egos , but they can't wait for the moment they drop the H bomb .

So , from what I can tell , basically Harvard graduates play this game about telling people where they went to school , because they think other people will be so impressed that they went to Harvard that they won't be able to talk about anything else Or they worry that other people will think they are bragging elitist a-holes since they go to Harvard .

Okay , first of all , i do know a fair number of Harvard graduates from medical school and residency and most of them are pretty decent people who are not this brand of a-hole .

I've never heard them hesitate to say Harvard when asked where they went to school , and I don't think I've ever heard them name drop Harvard either , sort of like Andy from the TV show The Office talks about going to Cornell all the time , in full disclosure .

My brother went to Harvard for his master's degree and he's a pretty chill guy , maybe because most of the people I know were in the medical field and they were in finance , bros or some other career path . But most of these Harvard grads seemed pretty down to earth .

Perhaps it may be because medicine is not really a field where connections and privilege mean as much as some other fields . Maybe you can't get good MCAT scores or medical school grades or do well on your board exams . It's pretty hard to skate by on inherited well or your parents' golfing buddies making a phone call for you .

Personally , i never thought that going to Harvard was such a huge deal , but maybe . Having gone to some fairly elitist schools myself , i feel comfortable not being super impressed by people who say they're Harvard grads . I mean full disclosure . I applied to Harvard but didn't get in for undergrad .

I had to settle for Duke University , then Columbia University for Medical School , university of Michigan for Plastic Surgery Training and UCLA for Pediatric and Creniofacial Training . So throwing around a name like Harvard when I could throw around a bunch of pretty elitist names too maybe immunize me a little bit from thinking Harvard was such an impressive place .

Quickly googling Harvard students , the two who are arguably the most impressive are the ones who decided it wasn't even worth the time to get a Harvard degree Bill Gates of Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook , both left before graduating .

And for every other Harvard graduate , such as Natalie Portman , lynn Sanities , jeremy Lin or former Jets quarterback Ryan Fitzmagic that graduated from Harvard . There are also the Harvard graduates , such as the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and the quote my family gave $2.5 million and I had crappy high school grades Student Jared Kushner .

Harvard is like any other university where a significant proportion of students are not admitted unmerited . Many are either recruited athletes , legacy students , kids whose families have donated significant sums to the university , or children of faculty instead . It is estimated that roughly three quarters of these applicants would have been rejected under merit-based standards .

There are great students , average students and mediocre students , just like at every other institution . For Harvard graduates to think they need to hesitate before dropping the H-bomb on others , that's pompous . It pretentious , egotistical , big-headed , poncy and every other synonym I could find for conceited in the dictionary .

Now I can understand a certain degree of acting stupid like this . When I first finished my training for a long time , when people would ask what I did for a living , i wouldn't say plastic surgeon right off the bat . I'd say doctor and then , if they asked , i'd say surgeon and then I'd finally say plastic surgeon if they kept asking .

And that drawn-out way of telling people my job was driven by the exact same thinking that these silly Harvard graduates use . I don't want to brag too much , because it's a big deal that I'm a plastic surgeon , right ? Why be inundated with questions from the shock and awe of meeting a plastic surgeon ?

And once I honestly realized what a douchey thing it was to be coy about my job . Unfortunately , i probably realized way too late . Now , when someone asks , i just say plastic surgeon . It's just an effing job like any other job out there and nobody cares . And Harvard is a college just like any other college out there Nobody cares .

So advice to anyone , whether you go to Blue Mountain State University or Harvard College , the correct answer to avoid being or sounding like a complete bloviating a-hole is , when asked where you go to school or where you went to school , is to promptly and cheerfully say your college name without delay . If you went to Harvard , say Harvard .

Don't worry about what people think about your school , own it . Don't try to explain you grew up in a small town or that you work in a soup kitchen in your spare time . You went to a college . Deal with whatever people are saying to you .

Anything else will just validate all of the elitist , self-important stereotypes that hopefully you are trying to eradicate And never , ever ever use the term H-Bong , at least where I can hear you . Thank you . My weekly thankful is something I've discussed on the podcast three plastic surgeons and a microphone with my friends Dr Sam Jurekar and Sal Vichel .

It's a drug called TXA or trannexamic acid , that we use during surgery . Sal likes to use a Borat voice when he talks about it TX&A . It's a nice . Now it seems frivolous or extra to be thankful for a drug that I use at work .

It might seem like it's being thankful for your computer or pen and paper at work is just something that you use , but after working for 17 years as a plastic surgeon , it's the little things that make your work better and easier that you appreciate And having used TXA for almost two years , i realized it's one of the little things that has really helped both me

and my patients with better outcomes .

Txa helps reduce bleeding during surgery . Most of the time patients don't bleed too much during surgery , but some patients tend to bleed more than others . But TXA make every patient a non-bleeder , pretty much .

It's very safe , easy to use and I have used it for every operation Face and eyelid lifts , breast lifts and augmentations , tummy tucks , liposuction you name it . Bruising and swelling is less with TXA as well .

I consider it a wonder drug and out of the many things we use in surgery to help us get better results , i would say it's quickly become a staple for me and probably every other plastic surgeon out there .

Having surgical skill is certainly the paramount thing for surgeons , but we all like the little things that also help make us look good as surgeons , and TXA is one of them . If you want to share thankful or what you think about your school versus the HBOM , dm me at Botox and Burpee's podcast on Instagram or leave a comment at youtubecom .

Thank you for all your feedback . It has been much appreciated and if you have any topics or ideas you'd like to hear about , please let me know . And don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get this podcast . Thank you .