Point one: Mad science is allowed. It won't be as crazy, off-the-wall powerful as the genius setting where you can build death rays out of toasters... unless, of course, that's your personal magical power, in which case all bets are off. However, even a nonmagical tech genius type character can achieve results well beyond what's real-world practical.
Point two: Part of the reason magic remains hidden is that, while there are a vast variety of magical talents, there's also one really common talent, possessed (to some degree or another) by something like one fifth of the population: the talent to shut down magic. Trying to work magic in a crowd... usually doesn't work; there are enough nulls around that your spell just fizzles. In its most common variation, a null simply weakens nearby magic - but how much weaker, and what constitutes nearby, varies from person to person. There are legends of nulls who could focus their powers more tightly than this, blocking enemy spells while allowing their allies to cast unhindered - but they are, for the most part, just that: legends. Most powerful nulls in modern times simply don't believe in magic, which makes practicing to focus the talent... difficult.
SU (usually pronounced "soo") does not hire nulls (except for a few critical locations where people need to be used to working without magic - like sports instructors), nor does it admit them as students. A few can usually be found on campus anyway - course exchange students from HMTI, or prospective students looking to tour the campus, or visiting parents, or so on. Still, it's a much more magic-friendly place than one would expect from its population density.
HMTI (usually pronounced "him-tea") has no such restrictions in hiring or admissions. This goes a long way to explain some of the student rivalries between the two institutions.
Point three: This is, to some extent, a "and the kitchen sink" type setting. If you can find a mythical creature in some book somewhere, it probably exists in the setting. Somewhere. If you can't find what you're looking for in a book - it probably exists anyway. Please note that this is not always a good thing: Cthulu mythos type stuff comes to mind. Fortunately, the gibbering horrors from the dimension next door can be shut down by your average basketball team; having nulls around does, occasionally, come in handy.
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