example: Hub, Wastelands, East, Tribal, Newreno, Vault. George Fromreno’s family has been living in Redding for the past three generations but his surname-less grandfather got stuck with one nickname and now it’s permanent to all his descendants. Veronica Vault’s great great grandmother still has her old Vault suit in her attic somewhere, but nobody has been able to find it yet. Veronica herself has been inside a Vault exactly once in that hotel in New Vegas

type c: physical attributes 

example: Smoothskin, One-eye, Blonde. Lily Smoothskin grew up around ghouls and hundreds of years later all her descendants share her moniker

type d: surnames that people created for themselves. in this headcanon the NCR decided to force everyone to get a surname for census + cultural “reformation” purposes after Tandi died. values and ideas.

example: literally anything a New Californian or a Wasteland immigrant could decide to name themselves after. Sequoia. Fast. Republic. etc. Cory Bearhead keeps getting mistaken for an ex-tribal even though his father, who gave him that name, was a hyperpatriotic chauvanist. 

type e: normal pre-War surnames, but was only taken after the originally surname-less individual was forced to decide on a family name for aforementioned government reasons 

example: any Anglo-American surname that was common before the War. Johnson. Smith. John P. Smith is a tribal who ended up gaining New Californian citizenship but didn’t want to deal with name-based discrimination by taking up a flashy surname. He used to be called Peace-Upon-The-Shore. The P stands for Peace, but he doesn’t write that on his resume. 

type f: job names that wasn’t really prominent when the usual Anglo surnames started becoming a thing back in the olden days

for context Ho Chi Minh, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Agatha Christie were all born in 1890. Ho Chi Minha and Eisenhower both died in 1969. De Gaulle died in 1970 and Agatha Christie outlasted all of them in 1976. but apparently Tandi died in 1993 with her mind more-or-less intact, so that is pretty crazy.

Aradesh himself served from 2189 to 2196. seven years, really a drop in the bucket compared to Tandi's 52. amazing how the length of her life when she was president and time when she wasn't is almost equal in length. regardless, 2189 compared to 2281 what 1934 is to 2026. to the Courier, the NCR is as old as any nation born in 1934. so basically, older than basically every post-colonial republic.

so 1934-1941 Aradesh. 1941-1993 Tandi. then you get Joanna Tibbett for five years, 1993 to 1998. basically what if Bill Clinton was a one-term president. then it's Wendell Peterson for twenty years, so 1998 to 2018. which is fucking insane by the way. there are actual dictators out there who never made it to 20.

then Aaron Kimball mysteriously kicks him out in two months. Peterson must've pissed someone off big time for that to happen, considering how entrenched he must've been to NCR politics by that point.

but anyway so Kimball's been serving for the past 8 years, basically. also he's 48 by the time of the game, so he was 40?? when he first served? damn. the man's young, that's crazy. JFK was 43 when he became president and everyone called him a child. Emmanuel Macron was 39 and he came to power in 2017, so it actually kind of fits up. Macron-Kimball parallel when.

rival to ABMU, run by the OSI. using specifically the pre-War name of the city is lowk intentional, the specific OSI personnel who looked over its creation was one of the US nostalgic ones. in the NCR of 2281, of course, Los Angeles is the name of the state and Angel's Boneyard is the name of the city. LAUSTM has been the #1 medical school for years but they still have a chip in their shoulder about the FoA hospital having more patients (it has more patients because it's free...)

#3 University of New California, Vault City, School of Medicine (UNC Vault City, or UNCVC)

the VC campus of the publicly-run University of New California network. vaguely inspired by the University of California system. the original building was a repurposed old school that was built in Vault City's pre-NCR days, but the campus had to move outside the city walls after UNC VC grew too large.

#4 Hub National University, School of Medicine (HNU)

the HNU is one the most prestigious schools in the country, though its medical school is not as good as those in the Boneyard. still pretty hard to get into. most people don't know this but the HNU medical school is exactly one year older than ABMU, making it the oldest medical school in the country

#5 Tibbett Institute of Life Sciences, School of Human Medicine (TILS)

the TILS is more focused on agronomics research than producing doctors, but they've been branching out into Human Medicine after their acquisition of Dayglow Medical College (which was, despite its name, not actually in the city of Dayglow but a neighboring lesser-known barely-city of Glowtown). TILS was indeed named after Joanna Tibbett while she was Vice-President. in this headcanon Tibbett, a biologist by training, helped give funding to the school because she had a vague interest in sponsoring her former scientific colleagues, though she never followed up on it with anything like the OSI, due to her brief Followers past making it hard for her to imagine a non-private, non-volunteer-based organisation for science and medicine.

this means from the start TILS had quite a lot of FoA and former FoA staff working for it. under Kimball, TILS has slowly grown closer and closer to the OSI and its more nationalist mission despite its originally Followers-majority board)

#6 Shi Huang Di University of San Francisco, College of Medicine (SUSF)

most New Californians assume it's run by the Shi, but it was actually made by Shi-educated New Californian citizens rather than the Shi themselves. focused more on engineering than medicine, which is why it ranks relatively so low. in engineering it rivals the New Californian Institue of Technology (NCIT) in prestige

#7 Maxson State University, School of Medicine (MSU)