As anyone who is currently moving through the education system or who has just escaped it can tell you, the life of a student operates not on the good old Gregorian calendar but on the school calendar. The year begins in August, not January, and how long it runs depends on whether your grades require summer school. Summer is a time of rest and regeneration. Those with more schooling ahead of them rest and try to forget all they’ve learned while those who have escaped, even if only temporarily (myself included) do their best to break themselves from the school year cycle.
So why the esoteric, quasi-profound examination of the life cycle of students? Because I love orientation.
Yup, I love orientation. Mind you, I’m not an orientation adviser or otherwise associated with the orientation program at this university; I just happen to enjoy meeting incoming freshmen as they are exploring our campus. I’m not a stalker — I deal with orientation groups through my on-campus job — so don’t worry about having to get a restraining order.
Kids on the campus for orientation are usually a pleasure to talk with. There’s a mentality that schools are giving a glossed-over view of the institution; therefore, the best source for the “real deal” on the school and its environs is a non-affiliated student, a role I’m more than willing to fill. I’ll tell the incoming freshmen the best places to work on the campus and what food to stay away from at the dining hall.
Interaction with incoming freshmen is unavoidable for those who live, work or study on the campus during the summer. Not that such is a bad thing, as you should have gathered from the above paragraphs. However, not everyone has altruistic goals for meeting incoming freshmen at orientation. Stories of frat boys seducing naïve girls are mostly urban legends (I hope), but that’s not the only way to “corrupt” incoming freshmen.
My poker-playing, beer-drinking, bearded friend created an unofficial Poker, Beer and Beards club for the sole purpose of finding poker-playing pre-frosh to hustle. Though such a club is a brilliant idea in its own right, the concept of scamming incoming freshmen is sketchy. Luckily, such pipe dreams are few and far between.
One bad thing about spending time around incoming freshmen is seeing how incredibly young they look. You may think you’re a spry-looking 22-year-old, but wait until you cross paths with a baby-faced teenager. It’s tough deciding what’s more disturbing: realizing you used to look like that, or wondering what the hell happened. Don’t fret; the freshman 15 will hit them faster than you can say, “Late-night ice cream run.”
As those astute and devoted readers of my column know, my brother is among one of the hordes of incoming freshmen to this fine university for the upcoming school year. I do my best to avoid it, but it’s impossible for me to keep from judging the pre-frosh I meet in terms of how nice, smart or skeevy they look. I’ve got a mental checklist in my head of people who, if my brother introduces me to them after the first month of school as his friends, I will be obligated to punch in the face. Also, ladies, if you happen to meet a kid who looks like a taller, skinnier version of me and has the same last name, he is a very nice young man and you could do much worse than giving him the time of day.
Before I finish, I must weigh in on my absolute favorite aspect of the orientation process: the parents. They absolutely adore current students who give them advice or are merely friendly to them. If their child is the same gender as you, the parent will later tell the kid to be more like the nice upperclassmen they met, and if the child is of the opposite gender you can be sure the parent is sizing you up as a potential paramour for their pre-frosh. Really, the parents are the naïve ones in this equation. They think their beloved Timmy or Susie is matriculating to a quiet, cloistered campus where the only excitement comes from athletic events and ice cream socials. Just wait until their beloved offspring start buying beer instead of books.
Abram Fox is a senior art history and archeology and history major. He can be reached at abram@umd.edu.
