Whenever he’s feeling a little unfocused, Alex Pancoe has a looming four-story reminder to stay on track: The Arthur and Gladys Pancoe-Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Life Sciences Pavilion. The Weinberg senior’s grandparents donated money to construct the building after his cousin passed away from leukemia while attending NU.
Though the structure was completed around the same time Pancoe arrived on campus, the political science major’s courses are never in the laboratories of his namesake pavilion. “I’d have to have a slightly higher IQ to take classes in that building,” Pancoe says.
He’s found people rarely focus on his connection to the sciences building. Attending NU in his position has its perks, he says, such as knowing Provost Daniel Linzer personally. It also has its burdens: Whenever he passes the building, Pancoe feels pressure to match his relatives’ accomplishments.
On campus, familiarity with the building is somewhat limited, but students and professors occasionally ask Pancoe about the association. He once took a 150-person lecture in which the professor regularly cracked jokes about his family connection. “He thought it’d be funny to call on me all the time as ‘Dr. Pancoe,'” he says.
Communication freshman Melanie Anenberg gets grief like that a lot. She estimates about 10 percent of the people she meets ask if she is related to the man whose bust is on display in SESP’s home base, Annenberg Hall. There is no connection – his name has one more “n” than hers.
The coincidence led Anenberg to play a name game of her own. The first week of school, Anenberg was asked so often if she was related to Walter Annenberg that she eventually began answering ‘yes’. Her roommate got in on the joke, and the two searched Wikipedia for information about the billionaire, memorizing details about Anenberg’s fictional relative.
But even if you are related to someone whose name is on a campus building, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will be able to take classes inside. “The admissions office looks at all applications the same way. It’s that simple,” says Chuck Loebbaka, director of media relations for NU. Tell that to the McCormicks of the world.
