Question regarding OT Donatello's Degree
 

Just wondering if they ever said what degree Donatello earned, I don't recall them ever specifying though I could be wrong. All I remember hearing was "a degree from Sopho University."

Most likely a Bachelors in Engineering considering Donatello does machines.

Or it could've been a Bsc.

Almost certainly not an accredited academic institution!

Hey, it was the 90's and online college courses didn't exist yet. He had to do it through snail mail. The funny thing though is that was a season 4 episode where the TMNT were sometimes viewed at celebrity heroes, so if a different writer had worked on this episode we might've seen Donatello actually attend a local university. Of course the part about Irma posing as "Donna" would've been thrown out the window.

The University wanted to meet Donatello in person and wanted to exploit Donatello's intelligence for their own purposes so it's possible that the degree was a Master's degree.

Yeah, probably not a legit school and degree if they were just looking to exploit somebody. Poor guy.

Do they even do in person classes for college any more? When I got my bachelor's degree in 2007 from the Northwest Indiana branch of Purdue, they were transitioning to mostly online courses. Now that it's 10 years later, I wonder what percentage of college courses are actually done in the class room.

Plenty around here, our schools (university, community, etc.) offer some online, but it's not extensive. Maybe switching to more courses online is more a matter of convenience for some places?

The next series that is more similar to 2003 aught to have Donnie taking online classes. :)

I'd suggest Nick, but these Turtles seem more like they need to pass online high school first. lol

Indeed. Pretty hard to tell because up until then, they had rarely gone up against anyone major besides Shredder and Krang or the Rat King or Don Turtelli.

Yeah, there's no way any legit school would accept someone who isn't a registered citizen anywhere.

Yeah, not to mention they while they may have been pretty worldly in some ways, socially they're extremely sheltered and possibly very naive in that regard. With no internet back then he'd have no way to look for reviews or accreditation and might not even cross his mind to ever imagine that someone might try to use something as good as education for fraud or evil doing.



Would be fun if someday that was touched on again, but this time Donnie gets suspicious a school is a fraud and busts them.

I believe it was supposed to be a privately funded university since the Professor who ran it had the same name. My guess is that Donatello either faked an ID for himself (which SHOULD have clued them in to his gender) or they didn't really check. I know when I did a correspondence course for a high school government class that was done through a community college I didn't have to provide much info. Correspondence courses are pretty much done at your own pace anyway so there's not a lot of urgency to check on students.

Oddly enough, I borrowed the concept of Donatello's mistaken gender for a plot point in my main fic, and the incident even gets mentioned by Mikey as a joke regarding Don's actual gender. (In the story, he's been hiding the fact that he's a chimeric hermaphrodite- and when Mikey finds out he jokes that the university got the "Miss Donna Tello" right after all... ) That episode was part of the inspiration for Donatello being that way, because it made for an unusual point of conflict between the two, and his situation made him more objective about Mikey's "obsession"- at least until he decided Michelangelo was getting out of control, but by then he had to keep his mouth shut about their arguement out of concern that Mikey would spill the beans about his secret!

Jack Mendelsohn wrote the episode. Maybe he didn't want to portray whichever university in a bad light.

Six seven!