Tuesday, November 17, 2009
It’s hard to imagine a KU student wearing a black and gold shirt and shouting “Go Mizzou!”
But it’s not impossible for the students who crossed the border after attending the University of Missouri. They decided to continue their academic careers at the University of Kansas, facing the surprise of their friends and family.
“Many people would just laugh and ask ‘How could you do such a crazy thing?’ and ‘What are you doing? Are you trying to go behind enemy lines?’,” Robert Rescot, Macomb, Ill., doctoral student, said.
Rescot finished both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering at the University of Missouri. For his doctorate in transportation engineering, he decided to try something else.
“Initially, KU wasn’t on my radar of schools I was considering for perhaps all the obvious reasons, you know, as a Missouri student who spent seven years there,” Rescot said.
But then he ran into a KU professor whom he already knew from his work at Mizzou. From him, Rescot heard about the University.
He decided that this would be a great opportunity for him to have a say in the type of research he is doing. At the University, he would be more involved in the decisions of the next projects and would work more closely with the faculty.
Rescot said he knew that many people take the rivalry between the schools very seriously.
“At the end of the day, everyone’s really supportive of the opportunity and recognizing that KU is another great school in the Midwest,” he said. “It just happens to be a rival with Missouri.”
Everyone has a reason to choose Kansas over Missouri. For some, it is the quality of education in a certain subject; for some, it is the cost of education. For Tiffany Huggard-Lee, a classics graduate student who grew up in various places in Missouri, it was both.
A part of Huggard-Lee is still connected to her alma mater. When it starts to rain, she opens her black and gold MU umbrella and walks across campus amid students dressed in blue.
She still visits her family in Columbia about once a month. On game days, she roots for Mizzou, not because she feels closer to the team, but because her office mates root for the University, she said.
“At this point, I’m still for Mizzou,” Huggard-Lee said. “I think in some ways a college town is a college town, so there are a lot of similarities.”
Mallory Plancheon, Overland Park junior, considers herself “100 percent a Jayhawk.” However, in the fall of 2007, she decided she wanted to be a little further from home and started at Missouri.
It took her one semester to return to her roots and continue her studies in Lawrence. Her transition to cheering for the Jayhawks again was easy, she said.
“KU kinda has me now,” she said.
— Edited by Sarah Kelly
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