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Every school has their own stereotype that is perceived among those outside the community.  ECU is the party school, UNC is preppy, App is a hippie school and people have the tendency to stereotype UNCW as a laid back party school: all we do is wear our bathing suits to class, surf, and hit the beach.  In the summer that may be true, but during the school year we are a motivated and involved campus that works extremely hard on our academic goals.  UNCW can be misunderstood by many outsiders who are not involved in our daily lifestyles. From the hundreds of different campus organizations to the thousands of courses that intellectually challenge us, we are anything but slackers. Additionally, because of our location near the beach, we tend to love a healthy and active lifestyle as well.  Whether it’s walking the loop, surfing, kayaking, paddle boarding, wake boarding, biking and many other activities, we are able to maintain a positive attitude about life.  

As a brand, UNCW has been observed as the second hardest public university to get into in North Carolina.  Its academic growth over the last few years has skyrocketed past its many competitors.  With many additions, like the McNeill School of Nursing and the latest cutting-edge technology in nursing education, we have been able to teach our students to the best of our abilities. Even with our amount of academic growth, we are still able to keep a small atmospheric feel by having smaller classes for high quality student-teacher interactions. As a coastal university we also provide a perfect environment for our multiple Marine Science programs.

UNCW was also just named one of the nation’s “Best Value” Public Colleges and Universities by The Princeton Review for the fourth year in a row. We are viewed as a school with a superb faculty that students are very fond of. It’s not often that you hear someone talking about how much they don’t like a professor; instead you hear things like, “This professor made this class so much more interesting than I thought it would be.”

As you can see, our university has many things going for it other than being on the coast and having great weather. Though we literally live on the beach, UNCW clearly goes beyond its perceived stereotype of slackers, beach bums, and surfers.

Leanna Marshall, Leslie Tyler, Bryce Koonts, Julius Roberts

“The South: where tea is sweet and accents are sweeter, summer starts in April, front porches are wide and words are long, macaroni and cheese is a vegetable, pecan pie is always a staple, Y’all is the only proper noun, chicken is fried and biscuits come with gravy, everything is darling, and someone is always being blessed.”

-Anonymous

 Welcome to The South!  Don’t forget to grab your Bible, your beer, and your Confederate flag when you cross that Mason Dixon line.  Shed your clothes for a fashionable pair of acid wash, denim overalls and a wife beater and trade your purse in for your very own shotgun.  Forget every vocabulary word you ever learned in school and begin using words like “ain’t” and “y’all” while throwing every rule of grammar out of your pick-up truck window.  At least, this is what people expect when you enter the area of the United States known as “The South”. 

 The South is an area known geographically as being the southeastern most part of the United States and includes sixteen states and over thirty-five percent of the country’s population.  Even with metropolitan cities such as Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia, The South is stereotyped as being extremely behind the times.  This idea is not only absolutely ridiculous, but is ignorant as well.  Even though The South is not home to any Ivy League universities, they are still known for their prestigious universities such as Duke, Elon, and Vanderbilt. 

Whether or not you care to admit it, Southern ideals have been influencing the rest of the United States for decades.  Many politicians were born and raised in the South and carry the lifestyle with them to The White House.  Southerners view on religion and incorporating God into their daily lives, literature, and philosophies is an inspiration.  In fact, The South is a place where you can recite the Pledge of Allegiance without worrying about censorship and dirty looks.  The characteristics of the “Southern Gentleman” have been incorporated into every woman’s ideal man and the term “Southern hospitality” is known throughout the world as being by far the best.

 The South has an unforgettable culture full of pineapples, moonshine, and good manners.  It’s incredible culture has influenced everything from food to lifestyle and continues to make an impact on American culture.

 So the next time you hear another Redneck joke remember that there are no Rednecks in The South, unless someone forgets to wear sunscreen!  Have a great day, y’all!

 -Christina Stevenson, Mollie Berthold, Dorothy Conley, & Laura Simmons 

For roughly 10% of UNCW’s student body, this week marks the beginning of one of the most hectic weeks of their semester, Greek Week. The 1,000 students involved in Greek organizations are paired off and participate in competitive events every night of the week. While this means that the students involved will have to spend late nights finishing assignments, practicing for the final event (Talent Show), and attempting to show the most “spirit” it also means there will be a great deal of brand association and personal marketing taking place as well that extends passed the PicNik-ed profile pictures and team boasting tweets.

Most fraternity/sorority chapters will put extra emphasis on going to class and events wearing letter shirts or something that coincides with their team’s theme. Although the UNCW Greek community prides itself on being founded on four pillars of Scholarship, Service, Leadership, and Friendship, those on the outside observing the brand may hold other preconceived opinions. Members of fraternities and sororities are often stereotyped and grouped into compartments of bias, whether it be from mas media such as reality TV shows, movies, or YouTube spoofs, some people simply write these organizations off as Animal House replicas. Even though this week includes charitable action and often the representation of the organization’s philanthropic endeavors, spectators have mixed judgments about the presence of such events. Broadcasting Fraternity or Sorority paraphernalia can link one to stereotypes of partying, vapidness, and frivolity but those who are more familiar with the UNCW Greek brand further than just the surface value of pop culture’s interpretation of fraternity and sorority life, find a much different meaning behind such rhetorical artifacts.

For those who are a part of a Greek organization, letters are more than a TFM (total frat move), they are the embodiment of their values and chapter standards. Wearing letters also comes with the responsibility of the individual to disprove such stereotypes and represent their brand well. UNCW Greek members, as a whole, are noted to have a higher GPA than non-Greeks. What matters more is that those members act in a positive manner that defies previous assumptions about fraternities and sororities. The key to personal branding is to know what message you are sending out and how to alter perspectives; if a faction of people judge the Greek brand as specific negatives, the best defense is to represent that same brand while doing productively positive things.

-Alexis Kapczynski, Sara Kaloudis, Josh Bowman, Kacy Cox