ETHAN EISLER & ETHAN KELLOGG
Growing up in the Bay Area, MVHS alumni ‘25 Ethan Eisler and Ethan Kellogg say they were never far away from other Ethans. The two first met in elementary school, but it wasn’t until middle school that they became friends. Even then, their matching names held little significance — Kellogg says he just knew Eisler as the taller kid who happened to share his name.
“As a kid I would naturally be drawn to people who had the exact same name as I did,” Kellogg said. “I don’t think I care about it as much now, but maybe that mindset has carried over.”
It wasn’t until they had both joined El Estoque, that their names began to matter. During their time on staff, the two met Ethan Yang, a current senior and Sports Editor, and the three quickly became inseparable, earning the nickname “The Ethans.” According to Kellogg, classmates would often call out “Ethan” just to watch all three heads turn in unison. To keep them straight, Eisler notes that creating nicknames was necessary. Eisler often was referred to by his last name, and sometimes even his middle name: Mitchell.
“There were lots of people who just called me Eisler to the point where everyone forgot my first name,” Eisler said. “People that I was meeting for the first time would genuinely think my name was Eisler and not Ethan.”
Still, according to Kellogg, the trio embraced the novelty and fun of their shared name whenever they could. Rather than letting the confusion get to them, Eisler believes that the three of them leaned into it and continued hanging out together and made their shared name part of who they were as a group.
“It’s not every day you see three people with the same name hanging out,” Eisler said. “There were times where we would play with that, like the three-Ethans photo at prom. And we’re still friends to this day.”
Although they both grew up surrounded by the name, both Eisler and Kellogg believe their transitions to college marked a change. Outside of FUHSD and the Bay Area, the two say they find others who share the same name harder to come across. Kellogg, now at University of Southern California, finds himself meeting fewer people who share his name, though he still occasionally asks his friends to introduce him to other Ethans.
Looking back, both see their shared name not as the reason they became friends, but more as something that made their friendship more memorable. Even so, both describe a natural tendency to gravitate towards other Ethans, which is something neither can fully explain.
“A lot of the time to make a friend you need to have at least something in common that helps out,” Kellogg said. “And like a name really could be that little stepping stone to like becoming friends with someone. It’s super easy and accessible too because the first thing you learn about a person is usually their name.”
EMMA CHOW & EMMA HUANG
After years of sharing her name with classmates, friends and even strangers across multiple schools, sophomore Emma Chow has grown used to hearing “Emma” without assuming she is being summoned. So, when it’s called throughout the hallways, Chow pauses, but doesn’t turn around.
“If people say ‘Emma’ in classrooms or other similar settings, I just think, ‘Oh, that’s probably not me,’” Chow said. “To some extent, I’m desensitized to the name Emma, because so many people share the same name. Instead, sometimes they’ll throw my full Chinese name across the room, or it’ll be an inside joke between my friends and I. Teachers often add our last names automatically when our first name shows up more than once in a class as well.”
Across campus, sophomore Emma Huang has learned to do the same. Like Chow, she has grown accustomed to a name that only sometimes clearly points to only her. The two first met in eighth grade through a shared English class with Cory Greene, eventually forming a friendship that, in part, revolved around their shared name.
“Whenever Mr. Greene tried to pass back our assignments, he would often mistake me for Emma Chow and Emma Chow for me,” Huang said. “We often did projects together just to confuse him intentionally. At some point he just started referring to us as ‘the collective Emmas.’”
In settings with more people who share the same name, the nicknames become even more creative. During a combined ninth grade P.E. dance unit where multiple classes merged, three different Emmas, Emma Ma, Huang and Chow, found themselves grouped together.
“We joked about being three different sizes of Emmas: tall, medium and short,” Huang said. “Given our evident height differences, it was just easy to differentiate us using our respective attributes.”
Even so, neither Chow or Huang sees their shared name as something that defines or limits them. If anything, for the two, it almost becomes a starting point for new connections.
“It’s easier because you actually relate to the other even without talking to each other, especially for an introvert like me,” Chow said. “But at the end of the day, I think I would have become friends with them regardless.”
ANNA ZHANG & ANNA ZHANG
Beyond having the same first and last name, freshman Anna Zhang and junior Anna Zhang have found unexpected similarities between themselves in nearly every aspect of their lives. For starters, both play on the tennis team, sit at the same seat at the same engineering table during different class periods and unknowingly create identical projects for the same assignment. After meeting at the beginning of the school year through a mutual friend and on the tennis court, where junior Zhang would often hear her name called across the court only to realize it wasn’t meant for her, these coincidences began to fall into pattern.
“My mom attended the robotics interest meeting and she said the person that was leading the presentation really looked like me,” freshman Zhang said. “Then, she later found out that the person was also named Anna Zhang, and she was like, ‘Oh my God, you guys are twins.’ We were sick during that same time too, so we were both wearing masks.”
While the two believed that their shared name helped them bond, having the same first and last name also brought its own share of confusion. For many of their friends, the confusion between the two became an inside joke as they would sometimes call the name “Anna Zhang” to intentionally confuse the two of them.
“For robotics, I bought something with the name Anna Zhang and then I shipped it to the school, and the office called her out of class to go pick it up,” junior Zhang said. “So now I joke: if I want to get her called out of class again, I can just ship another package.”
From turning their heads at the same time to when someone calls their name to pausing mid-conversation to figure out which Anna is being addressed, the two notice this overlap following them throughout the school day. To make things easier, both note how their mutual friends in the friend group have created their own system to distinguish the two: freshman Zhang is referred to as “small Anna,” while junior Zhang is “big Anna,” despite freshman Anna being a tad bit taller. According to the two, many of their friends have also opted to refer to the freshman and junior by their Instagram usernames, which are ‘asparagus’ and ‘grass’ respectively.
“I guess people find it really funny that we both have the same name,” junior Zhang said. ”It’s kind of like an inside joke that we have a lot of similarities because we have the same name, but maybe it’s also just a bias. Now it’s just something we share, and it’s kind of nice.”
