I grew up in central Illinois but in 1978 my family moved, following my dad's manufacturing job when the company relocated to northeast Georgia. I went through junior high and high school hearing nothing but bulldog-worship. Every Monday in fall, over the school intercom, the principal would lead the whole school in a chorus of, "how 'bout them dawgs!" ( I shudder at the memory of it.) The only college teams you'd hear about were uGA (90%), and Clemson (10%), so I picked Clemson to root for; no way I was cheering for the bulldogs. Where I live, it was as if no other schools even existed—well, except maybe in 1980 when the dwags played Notre Dame for the national championship. The months of grinning, gap-toothed hick-frenzy after that game were nauseating, and it tempered my hatred (in the metallurgical sense) for all things dwaggish.
It was around that time—as I started into my junior year in high school and realized my calling was "Science!"—that I heard about a small engineering school in downtown Atlanta—I had actually been in the state over three years before I even heard of Georgia Tech! (That's the way it goes, in rural north Georgia…) So just like some others who have posted, for me COFH came first, and that led me to Tech, rather than it being the other way around.
The really cool post-script to all this is that after I made my decision to attend Tech, my mom mentioned that my granddad—who had died a decade before I was born—had been a huge Tech fan back in Illinois, in the 30s and 40s. He would come home from a night of carousing singing the "Ramblin Wreck" and waking the neighbors. Maybe it was more about it being a good Irish drinking song than about Georgia Tech itself, but I'd like to think, in hindsight, that maybe Tech fandom actually was something in my blood...
I hope more people reply to this thread.
