Wow, lots of young Yellow Jackets barely out of larvae stage here!
Summer of 1977.
My senior year of high school was spent at a really small (40 students at peak) American prep school in the Austrian Alps and I took my SAT tests at the airbase in Munich since that was the closest place, and nailed them in the top 1% without any prep at all (maybe that's the secret). Tech wasn't on my short list at the time so my transcripts went out to several good engineering schools, Purdue, Illinois, even UCLA, etc. The school's headmaster really pushed for me to go to Lehigh or Holy Cross. I only heard of Georgia Tech from the old football scoreboard shows with Bill Flemming, I liked how it rolled off the tongue. But my Mom and Dad knew of Tech and Bobby Dodd from the glory days in the 50s - Tech was a big deal in northern Ohio. After graduating I flew back "home" to Dhahran Saudi Arabia and worked as a draftsman that summer. We took our first stateside trip since moving over there in 75 from Ohio and stayed with my older siblings in Orlando for a couple weeks. My Mom knew Tech was one of the best engineering schools in the country and we drove up to show my older brother the campus. He was working as a bartender at Disney and taking classes at FTU ("Florida Tech", the precursor to Central Florida!) so Mom wanted him to seriously upgrade his education, but it was me who fell in love with the place. I picked up my first Tech shirt from the old bookstore and we flew back "home" for the rest of the summer. I enrolled from there. That's when I began rooting like a maniac for Tech - and I didn't even know about Clean Old Fashioned Hate so "To HELL With georgia!" was confusing in our fight song - I thought it was referring to the rest of the state! I wore my shirt everywhere in Saudi and one day at work one of the older guys at a construction site saw my shirt and sang "Ramblin' Wreck"... in freaking Saudi Arabia! I signed up for a room in McDaniel dorm (TECHWOOD!) and made life long friends who I still get together with every time we can for extravagant opponent-themed tailgating on campus. I tried retiring twice, but was bored and didn't want to waste my great Electrical Engineering With Honors degree from THE Tech!
And now you know... the REST of the story.