With this recipe, it is easy to select colleges between two letters of the alphabet. For instance, to select all colleges that begin with the letter D through S, you would use college.loc['D':'T']. Slicing like this is still inclusive of the last index so this would technically return a college with the exact name T.

This type of slicing also works when the index is sorted in the opposite direction. You can determine which direction the index is sorted with the index attribute, is_monotonic_increasing or is_monotonic_decreasing. Either of these must be True in order for lexicographic slicing to work. For instance, the following code lexicographically sorts the index from Z to A:

>>> college = college.sort_index(ascending=False)
>>> college.index.is_monotonic_decreasing
True
>>> college.loc['E':'B']