American universities are, to put it simply, some of the most famous in the world. That doesn’t mean you’ll know everything about them though, as often the strangest, most interesting facts get left out of the official prospectuses. Here are some of our favorite weird and unbelievable facts about the top US universities in the QS World University Rankings® 2018.
MIT students can become fully qualified pirates
Well, sort of. Any student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who completes archery, fencing, sailing and pistol (or rifle) classes is eligible to receive a pirate’s license. It doesn’t give you the right to commandeer a vessel, smuggle goods or drink all the rum though.
A Stanford student has won a medal at every Olympics since 1908
Not the same student every year, obviously. Still, this is a remarkably impressive feat for the university and its athletes.
The statue of John Harvard at Harvard is actually of someone else
Nobody actually knows what John Harvard looked like, so when it was time for Daniel Chester French to make the statue which sits in Harvard Yard at the university, he used a friend’s likeness instead.
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