By the way, I don't see any sense in a sentence about a person being smart and being in school. You can be in school just because you're a kid, and required to be in school by law. You can be in school and be dumb. You can be smart and not be in school, etc etc. <<< I was referring to college, but since I was using it as an example for finding the correct form of was/were, I didn't think the context of the example itself was that relevant. Therefore, I didn't spend a lot of time coming up with something that would please the "professionals" here. Nothing like being critiqued on how we phrase our questions. I'll refrain from asking from now on.