Talk:Style guide for alumni pages

• Not all B-school grads are MBA recipients. Or at least I don't think so...

Right, they also give out a PhD, but it's rare. That's why I parenthesesed MBA and left open other styles for other B-school degrees. I would recommend something like: PhD (Business) Pacman 23:45, 28 November 2007 (EST)

Warren Buffett received an MS. And the B-school had an undergrad program (basically an accounting major) until the 1950s. And the fact that you, me, and Raza are spending our time debating this across half the world is more proof than ever that WikiCU needs new blood beyond its core corps of CUCom holdouts. Ttan 01:42, 29 November 2007 (EST)

• Guys this gets just #(@#$ messy. For example, for a long time, the med school award MBs, not MDs. The law school awarded LLBs, not JDs. And right now, the legal name of our degree, as denoted by my transcript, is still AB. I don't think identifying the degree with the school is of much help either, because schools like GSAS were recently formed of faculties that have been in the books for ages. Nor is assuming that certain degrees are ONLY awarded by certain schools (GS and the Nursing both award BAs, for example). Moreover, SEAS has had almost a half-dozen names throughout its lifetime. I think the ideal form would be: Name Degree (Discipline/Faculty) Year. I.E.:

• Warren Buffett MS (Business) '51
• John Jay AB (College) 1764
• Alfredo Zaragoza BA (GS) '05
• Wm. Theodore de Bary AB (College) '41, MA (Philosophy) '48, PhD (Philosophy) '53, LittD (Hons) '94

Thoughts and suggestions? Ttan 01:48, 29 November 2007 (EST)

Your system is theoretically ideal but aesthetically fugly. Pacman 01:50, 29 November 2007 (EST)

Then lets decide on a list of shorthands / degrees that are unambiguously awarded only by a single faculty:

• AB = CC/KC AB
• JD = Law
• LLB = Law
• MBA = Business
• MD = Medicine'
• BC = Barnard BA
• MArch = Architecture
• MFA = SoA

That's about it. Even using "J" for Journalism is bad, because Journalism awards both MAs and MSes. Ttan 01:53, 29 November 2007 (EST)

But the MA in Journalism is rarely rewarded. Most people assume a J-School grad earned an MS, or that a Business student earned an MBA. The number of exceptions to these is rare enough that we have no examples on WikiCU so far of anyone earning a different degree from either school. In other exceptions you've mentioned, the problem is alleviated by giving the year - the College never awarded both ABs and BAs, nor the law school LLBs and JDs, in the same year. So why not add in the cumbersome parentheses only in the case of a ridiculously rare exception, like someone actually earning a B-School PhD. Otherwise, it doesn't hurt to use the least obstructive and most common (i.e. CC '07 as a familiar abbreviation) forms. I mean, Columbia magazine, which represents the entire university, doesn't go so far as to distinguish specific degrees. The only degrees for which I disagree are the MA and PhD, because a) GSAS has a virtual monopoly on these anyway, b) "GSAS" is comparatively new and c) they're both given out at about the same rate. Pacman 02:02, 29 November 2007 (EST)

There's one. Warren Buffett is MS '51, not MBA '51. Ttan 02:14, 29 November 2007 (EST)

So in the case of the schools with multiple degrees it's preferable to use the name of the school and not the degree. That's clear - I think it works for journalism for which we can use J (MA) in the exceptional case. Is there a simple abbreviation for the Business School that would easily distinguish it from Barnard? Some publications use Bus... Similarly, the degree issue might be tricky with the Medical School...replace with P&S? Pacman 02:17, 29 November 2007 (EST)