It's still a small world beyond the bubble

My alma mater is Beloit College. It's a small school, with fewer than 1,500 people enrolled in it any given year. However, all I have to do is put on a Beloit hoodie or t-shirt and I can go anywhere in the world and be stopped by someone who has gone there, or knows someone who has, or at least knows about the college. This has happened at the Apple Store, at the airport, in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., and in England.

Just last night an unusual coincidence occurred. It is the sequel to one of those chance encounters between Beloit alums that happens every time I put on some college outerwear.

In the summer of 2010, I was walking with a friend from Lancaster near the Milwaukee Public Museum. I was wearing my Beloit College t-shirt and I was stopped by a young man on the street who asked if I went to Beloit. I said I graduated from there and asked the young man what he was studying. He said "political science," I asked him about a professor, and after a nice chat we went on our anonymous ways.

Flash forward to January 2012. I am walking with my boyfriend to a birthday party for one of his friends. We are talking about random encounters with people from our pasts and I mention to him the Beloit meet-up described above.

At the party, I am told that there is another guest there who went to Beloit. I glance at the other alum across the bar and he looks incredibly similar to the young man I met more than a year and a half ago on the street. Eventually, I work up the courage to introduce myself awkwardly to him and ask if he went to Beloit and if he majored in political science. He says yes. I ask if he had ever stopped anyone on the street because they were wearing a Beloit College t-shirt.

Whaddya know, it is the same guy! He remembers the incident and vaguely remembers what I looked like. We chat briefly just like we did many months before, exchanging names and what we were doing with our lives. He happens to mention that often times when he wears Beloit apparel he gets stopped by random strangers with a connection to the school.

When you are at Beloit, they say you are in a "Beloit bubble," meaning an insular environment with no relation to the world outside campus. But it seems that the bubble has followed me everywhere, and I am going to keep putting on my Beliot shirts until they fade to nothing. These chance encounters are well worth the price of tuition.