Well, it looks like you made it-- through the college search, through the admissions process, through move-in day.
You made it to Hopkins. But now that you're here, you'd better know a little bit more about the school than just the average SAT score and how much higher your score is than those of all your friends. There are more important things to know, like why there's that extra "s" at the end of Johns, when the school was founded, and who was Johns Hopkins anyway?
With enough determination (and the five minutes it will take to read the following words), you, too, can acquire the know-how, the cerebral capacity, the savoir-faire to sit down to tea among a cluster of ultra-intellectuals and declare, "Why, yes, Johns Hopkins was a middle school dropout."
First things first: who was Johns Hopkins, and what's with the name?
Born in 1795, Johns Hopkins was actually the second in his family of the same name; his grandfather was the first. He came by the unusual moniker when his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns (whose father owned a 4,000-acre estate in Calvert County, Md.) married Gerard Hopkins in 1700. Combining their two surnames, they dubbed their son Johns Hopkins. The family, all Quakers, emancipated their slaves in 1807, so Hopkins subsequently ended his formal education and returned home at the age of 12 to maintain the family's farm with his family.
At 17, Hopkins left his home in Anne Arundel County to pursue a career in business at his uncle's grocery market in Baltimore.
Quickly developing prodigious financial skills, he established his own mercantile house at 24 and accumulated profound wealth. Hopkins was one of the main investors in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the nation's first major railroad. His stock in the company fell behind only two investors: the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore.
In 1867, Hopkins devoted the bulk of his wealth to establishing both the hospital and university that bear his name. Determined to embrace the needs of the people of Baltimore, especially African American orphans, Hopkins bought up land and set aside over $2 million in support of the hospital. He intended for the hospital ultimately to serve as a part of the university's medical school and formed two 12-member boards of trustees, each charged with running its respective institution.
When he died in 1873, Hopkins granted $3.5 million to both the hospital and the university, leaving Johns Hopkins University with the largest endowment of any college in the United States at the time, larger than those of Harvard, Princeton and Cornell, the institutions that had previously held the largest sum of donations.
Though the Civil War slowed its construction somewhat, the all-male university officially opened Feb. 22, 1876, inaugurating Daniel Coit Gilman as its first president. He immediately plotted a course for the University that would take it in a direction fundamentally different from any other in the U.S.
He established the first research university, adjoining research and teaching as intimately related ventures, in pursuit of "the encouragement of research...and the advancement of individual scholars, who, by their excellence, will advance the sciences they pursue and the society where they dwell."
On Oct. 4 of the same year, Professor Basil Gildersleeve gave the first lecture at 5 p.m. on Greek lyric poetry, and classes for students began the next day. The original faculty was composed of Gildersleeve, James J. Sylvester, Henry A. Rowland and Henry Newell Martin.
In 1883, the newly formed Johns Hopkins lacrosse club played its first game, losing 4-0 to the Druids Club of Baltimore. From 1888, Hopkins lacrosse teams play every year except 1944, with the intervention of World War II.
The Hopkins School of Nursing opened in 1889 following the completion of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1888. An editorial in the American heralded the school, saying, "Without careful nursing, medicine and surgery are crippled agencies in the preservation of health and life, and with careful nursing it is often possible to preserve both without their assistance."
The year 1896 marked the founding of the News-Letter, originally opposed by the trustees, which was printed every two weeks for the first twelve years, then weekly in 1909.
The University was initially intended for location in Clifton Park, Johns Hopkins' former estate, but in 1901 donors William Wyman and William Keyser offered a gift of 151.75 acres of land on Charles Street, only months before Ira Remsen was selected as the second president of the school.
Though many of the buildings at the original campus bore the same names of those at today's Homewood campus (McCoy and Levering, for instance), the new campus did not begin to materialize until 1907 when Homewood Field was completed, and a building in honor of Gilman was slated for construction in 1912.
The School of Engineering was established in 1919 when the department of applied science and advanced technology, funded and formed by the State of Maryland in 1913, became its own division of JHU.
The School of Hygiene and Public Health followed in 1918, opening in the physical laboratory of the old downtown campus.
Ninety years after the school's founding, the School of Arts and Sciences was created by the merger of the School of Engineering Sciences and the Faculty of Philosophy. Three years later, in 1969, the Academic Council recommended to the University that women be admitted to the undergraduate divisions of JHU. The policy was made official 11 days later.
The Peabody Institute and JHU formally affiliated in 1977 after nearly a century of informal ties. Faculty member Leon Fleisher declared, "It's a recognition that music is one of those human activities that most enoble the spirit, which I think is one of Hopkins' goals."
On Sept. 1, 1996, William R. Brody occupied the seat of president of JHU, the University's thirteenth.
From 1987 to 1994, Brody was a Martin Donner Professor and director of the Department of Radiology, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering at JHU. He still serves as president of the University today.
Just in time for the University's 125th anniversary in 2001, a new "master plan for Homewood" was adopted, and an anonymous donation kick-started the project into implementation.
New brick, marble and granite paths replaced the many asphalt roads and paths in an effort to beautify the campus.
Now that you've gotten just a tiny sample of the rich history of your new home, it's time to start studying.
You will be tested on the above information on Monday in the library. Bring a No. 2 pencil and a blank piece of paper on which to draw a detailed map of the campus. If you receive a grade lower than 85 percent, you had better start looking for a new school.
Okay, so maybe there isn't a test.
