[web] SQL and FULLTEXT

Okay, I am having some serious issues with fulltext and getting it to work in all of my sql queries. I am currently using MySQL. So basically I have a structure that contains a title, description, school, and course. They are all of type TEXT, and at the bottom of the table I have: FULLTEXT(title,description,school,course). Infact, here is the whole table:

create table notes (
   id   int   not null, auto_increment, 
   title text,
   description text,
   school text,
   course text,
   primary key (id),
   FULLTEXT(title,description,school,course)
);

That should set up fulltext searching right? Okay, to test it, I inserted some data into my tables and put "Cornell University" as the school, with a title and description (no course number or description). I then did a query of:

select * from notes where match(title,description,school,course) against ('Cornell University');

It came up with 0 matches. What is the deal? Am I misunderstanding fulltext searching? Do I have to index my data every night or something? For the meantime I have gone back to "LIKE '%string%'" -- but it really isn't what I want. I want a good old fulltext search like it is advertised. Anyone know my issue? Essentially, I want to search for keywords across all of those fields. So that if a student searches for 'Cornell University', even if title, description, and course had nothing -- if school was like it, it would return the value. Thanks.