A few fun things about teaching at your undergraduate alma mater, in no particular order:
You end up sitting next to someone on the bus who taught you Probability and Statistics 15 years ago and they are reading about the Optimal Sampling Theorem and it makes you smile.
The faculty who taught you Introductory Macroeconomics, Intermediate Microeconomics, Game Theory, Environmental Economics, Health Economics, and more observe your teaching and evaluate your tenure case. It’s like the ultimate test!
You can finally afford to do all the cool things in your bougie college town that you couldn’t afford to do when you were in college.
There’s a picture of you with a substantially worse haircut from the day you declared your major 16 years ago that was taken 20 feet from your current office. How far you’ve come…
You get to tell students in your classes, “Oh yeah, I took that class from that same prof! It was really hard!”
You also get to give a self-deprecating laugh and tell students in your classes, “One thing you can do with a degree from this institution is come back and teach here. Haha.”
You can remember a time when there were just two breweries in town. There are now 15. This is not an exaggeration.
You get to poke fun at the colleagues who taught you as an undergrad for being old while you try to ignore the fact that you are aging at the same rate.