Tough Love Advice For Freshmen
Congratulation freshmen, you’re the most clueless person on campus. All of us upperclassmen can point you out from a mile away while you look at your campus map trying to get to class during the first week. Maybe it’s a feeling of contempt we have towards you because you’re just beginning your college journey and we’re almost finished, but we’ll smirk our hardest at you whatever the matter is. Of course, if you’re going to be a freshman, you might as well do it right. Here’s some tough love advice you will thank me for later.
Scope out your classes ahead of time:
Your orientation advisers will tell you this a million times, and you’ll probably zone most of it out, but this is pretty good advice on a variety of levels. For practical purposes, it’s smart to know where your classes are so you’re not scrambling the morning of. For social purposes, doing this ahead of time enables you to not have your face in a map, a dead give away to everyone else on campus that you’re new, which we all equate to being an idiot.
Don’t wear your welcome week t-shirt:
You got a cool new t-shirt saying “(insert university) class of 2016.” Awesome, right? Wrong. Nobody actually wears those shirts, except dorky freshman of course. You don’t want to be a dorky freshman do you? Of course not, so don’t wear that shirt (I actually wore the shirt sometimes to work out, but I was so unaware of what cool was back then that it didn’t matter what I was wearing).
Don’t get a fake ID:
If your college bars are lax on carding people, congratulations, you’ll be fine. In all other cases, if you want to get into the bars you’ll have to get a fake. Smart people can get them from an older buddy who looks like them, but others will have to shell out cash to buy them. There always seems to be some shady guy in another residence hall who can get fakes made for you, for a price of course (the guy I knew who did this charged a ton, but a lot less for girls, meaning A. he was an even bigger creeper than your average fake ID guy B. the girls did something for the services, or C. the bars secretly hired this guy to pool more women into the bars so they weren’t such sausage fests).
I wouldn’t advise you to pay for a fake ID, because of how easily they can be taken away from you. So many bars scan IDs these days that it’s just not worth it. And yea, I know they told you that your fake would scan, but I’ve heard that plenty of times and seen good friends suffer the embarrassment of getting rejected at the door. Also, being under 21 should be the time when you’re hitting up house parties anyway. You have the rest of your life after 21 to go to bars, but there’s really only a certain window of opportunity to go to awesome house parties without feeling like you’re the oldest person there. The bars are timeless. House parties aren’t. Take advantage of them.
Come to college single:
This will probably be the most contentious advice I will give, but I would strongly advise all you incoming freshmen to come to college single. I really don’t want to convince people to break up with their high school sweethearts. Honestly, I don’t. My parents were high school sweethearts and are still together, so obviously in some instances it can work, but they are rare success stories. Various figures are thrown about, but I’ve found that as low as two percent of high school couples end up getting married. Two percent! Furthermore, people on average meet their future spouses in their early twenties. What kind of things are people usually doing in their early twenties? Oh that’s right, COLLEGE!
If I ran the world, no one would be able to go to college in a relationship. You’d have to sever all contact with your significant other back home for a period of two weeks, enabling you to meet new people without worrying about anyone else. There would be less messy breakups, less people moping around missing their girlfriends/boyfriends and more fun for everyone on campus. I guarantee it. Vote Brian Arola 2028.
Category: Freshman
