The Great College T-Shirt Project Day 8

Success! In today’s mail I had parcels from three different colleges.

Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut sent me kind of an odd little drawstring bag. I see now that I didn’t include that bag in the picture. What happened to that bag anyway? I think Joni confiscated it. Anyway, even though it wasn’t a t-shirt it was exciting to get something from them.

Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut sent me that neat little red pennant that you see in the picture. I actually like that. T-shirts are cool but they always wear out eventually and that little pennant is something that won’t wear out and doesn’t take up a lot of space. I also got some literature from Fairfield about their school. I’m expecting to get a lot of college literature even from schools that don’t send me any goodies.

The big hit of the day was from the University of Maine at their Machias, Maine campus. Yes, I got my first t-shirt from the great state of Maine. Not only that, they also sent me a lanyard and a pen, both in the school color of green. And yes, literature! A good deal of literature in fact. They have a beautiful campus on the coast of Maine. I think I actually would like to go school there.

As you may have guessed, I began my email campaign on the east coast of our nation and will be working more or less toward the west coast. So the materials I receive in the early stages will most likely all be from out east. The exceptions are Alaska and Hawaii, which I think were the first states I covered. Isn’t this exciting!?

The Great College T-Shirt Project Day 6

The Great College T-Shirt Project is moving along slowly but surely. Like I said last time, I had a few hundred email addresses in my list and decided to go ahead and start sending some out while I continued gathering more addresses. At this point I’ve emailed 240 colleges and my list still has another 460 schools on it. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, on that map of the US I’ve only covered about one-fourth of the states. Still lots of work to do.

So here are some initial observations: Most of the schools have not been responding to the emails. That’s okay, I actually didn’t expect to get many responses. Out of 240 emails sent, 34 have responded. Out of 34 responses, 30 have told me that they will not send a shirt, but 4 have responded favorably. But there’s still more than 200 schools that haven’t responded at all so there’s no way to tell if they’ll send anything or not. I’ll just have to wait and see.

Oh, I should mention that of the 4 schools that agreed to send something, only 1 actually promised a t-shirt. Two others said they would send me pennants, and the fourth said they would send a bag of some sort. That’s cool with me. I like t-shirts but really any kind of souvenir will be great.

The Great College T-Shirt Project

Often when I don’t have anything in particular to do I just kind of browse the internet at random. The other day I came across a blog entry from some guy where he explained how he had gotten a bunch of free t-shirts from different colleges and universities around the country. Basically he had come across a website that listed email addresses for about 1,700 schools and he emailed every single one of them and simply asked for a t-shirt, telling them that he would wear it around and give their school a little publicity. Can you imagine sending 1,700 emails? Well, if this guy is being honest, he got positive results from about half of them. According to his blog he ended up with 800-900 shirts along with other items like pens, coffee mugs, mousepads, etc. I think he said that one school actually sent him about 10 shirts for some reason.

Now, let me state for the record that I don’t need or want 800-900 t-shirts, although I could always give them away to people or to a charitable organization or something. However, this did sound like kind of a fun project. The guy I mentioned above said he spent an entire summer sending all those emails. I won’t spend that much time at it but I thought I would give it a try and see how it goes. It’s always fun to get free stuff. So I’ll take a crack at it. In his blog, this guy said that he had come across a website where it was very easy to get all those email addresses but that site doesn’t exist anymore so I’ll have to see what I can find on the web. Going to individual school websites to find an address would be way too time consuming.

So this is the beginning of my College T-Shirt Project of 2014. If this works out and if you’re related to me, I guess you know what you’re getting for Christmas this year.