For your purposes, 'in' should work, however it doesn't guarantee that the string starts with those characters. I'll just point out that there is 'startswith()' that tests string beginnings:
>>> a = "university of"
... b = "university of pythonia"
... c = "pythonia university of"
... print b.startswith(a) # does b start with a?
... print c.startswith(a) # does c start with a?
...
True
False
or, an alternative using slice notation:
>>> a = "university of"
... b = "university of pythonia"
... c = "pythonia university of"
... print b[:len(a)] == a # do the first few items (letters) in b equal a?
... print c[:len(a)] == a # do the first few items (letters) in c equal a?
...
True
False