I can remember being a little Indiana kid, not even able to pronounce the mouthful "Purdue Boilermakers" correctly. Our mascot stands out a bit from the rest, and some people aren't quite sure how we came about to be called the boilermakers. To figure that out, it requires a bit of a history lesson of our very own football team.

Although Purdue University was founded in 1869, we didn't have a football team until 1887. Since it was a rather up-and-coming organization for us, we only occasionally played against surrounding teams, like Butler, DePauw, and Wabash. We weren't necessarily the best team around until 1891, when we finally had a winning record. One of the more impactful games of this season was against Wabash College, as Purdue defeated the liberal arts school 44-0.

Wabash did not react well to this defeat, and they claimed that our men had beaten them by using brute force. In this era, Purdue students had the reputation of those who truly got their hands dirty, mainly by working with engines, in factories, and around agriculture. Our engineers were in fact frowned upon by the more liberal arts environments around, which included lawyers and businessmen. So inevitably, a Wabash newspaper made a media jab at our football team's injustice, referring to us as "the Burly Boiler Makers."

Instead of taking this derogatory name as an insult, we decided to embrace it. We quickly became known as the Purdue Boilermakers, and ever since, we have loved to represent our technical, engineer-driven students, no matter what anyone else calls us.