5 Lies You’re Told Going Into College

Siblings of Mark Wahlberg9 years ago

1. You need to go to lecture.

I guess I should qualify this with “it depends on your major,” but really it doesn’t. I go to a top 20 overall school (humble brag, TFM) and have a worse attendance record than Andre Drummond’s free throw percentage. Sometimes, though, you’re just going to have to go, either due to an overzealous professor or a mandated “participation” credit (failure is NF) so let me suggest the “want, would, if I have to” game. Basically, to make a highly complex and sophisticated system of rules and regulations short, you scan the room assigning a rating to the likelihood of (CONSENSUAL) sex with all female classmates, ranging from a “high want” to a “if I have to, to avoid death” rating. This is a sliding scale that can be reevaluated on a class-by-class basis, depending on coed attendance, effort, and varying levels of personal self-worth.

Overall it’s frankly shocking that over 300 years of secondary education (translation: college, here’s looking at you ASU grads) has not led to a more efficient, rewarding, and necessary form of education than the standard lecture format. Without Adderall, attending and paying attention deserves a far greater reward than high participation points. Like maybe some more lines of Adderall.

2. You’re going to become friends with people nothing like yourself.

Yea…about that. Sure most of your friends will be very different, geographically, but if there’s one thing college actually does, it shows you who the fuck you want to be friends with. Yes, your group of friends will become more diverse, you’ll argue about politics, sports teams, Entourage characters and the attractiveness of rival sororities, but if you came to school thinking band kids were weird, odds are you still will here.

Varying perspectives is an extremely fulfilling part of college, but especially for us in frats, the narrative featured on the front of most admissions pamphlets (1 frat guy, band girl, emo guy, person who’s gender is undeterminable, all behaving like the four best friends that anyone could have) is about as likely as a Bernie Sanders Presidency, not impossible, but beyond doubtful. You’ll surround yourself with like-minded people first, and as time goes on branch out more and more.

3. You’ll meet your future wife.

Right, maybe for a night and again in the morning if all goes well. Odds are most girls you’ll meet your first year will be thinking the same thing you are: “oh my God I’m free and can do anything I want!” Likely crashing back to Earth after a sloppy one nighter or two. Anyway, the set up of the Greek system doesn’t really accommodate happy long-term relationships. We are an incest-ridden bunch of questionable morals, good luck finding a tier I junior or senior who hasn’t been your pledge brother’s slam at one point. Or, at least,close to it. A lot of freshman girls will hand out blowies like welfare checks under President Sanders: everybody gets one.

The girls that come to school with boyfriends are undoubtedly the worst (or best depending on perspective) as in time essentially all long distance high school relationships will crash like Paul Walker was behind the wheel, resulting in a “first come first served” sadness induced slide into random sexual encounters and subsequent regret. You don’t want to catch anything more than HPV from the girl that did a line off the social chair’s frock. Trust me.

Enjoy your 4 or 5-year excuse to behave totally irresponsibly, avoid all reasonable forms of commitment, and actually be celebrated for your obscenely inappropriate actions and complete lack of remorse. Meet the wife later, and lie about everything that happened anyway. She will too.

4. You’ll “find your passion” by the time you need to pick a major.

Well, I guess if binge drinking, narcotic experimentation and unforgivably selfish sexual encounters are a “passion,” sure, most of us find it pretty quickly. If we’re talking about careers, however, things aren’t so fun and easy. A lot of us will have family businesses that make for a great deal of autonomy in our curriculum, one semester I took “aliens: are they out there” chased with the strenuous curriculum of “American Cinema of the 1990’s.”

This is great your first semester or two, but when sophomore/junior year comes around and your student advisor looks at your transcript like it’s positive for HIV, you realize you may have wanted to buckle down a bit. So, if you think you want to be a doctor don’t fuck around, go take orgo and see if your medical prowess extends past reruns of ER. Don’t worry everyone without direction, there’s always law school.

5. Being Greek is “not that important at X school” and or “overrated”

This is basically the international slogan of virgins, feminists, and those we can generally classify as goobers and or geeds. Yes, “buying” your friends by paying to upkeep the only place on campus most freshman and sophomore girls can comfortably get drunk wearing nothing but paint or lingerie is definitely “not that important.” Good luck being an underaged dude in college without a Greek affiliation, I’m sure the dorm “parties” (consisting of a stolen IPA and an iPhone speaker) get pretty rowdy when the “RA is down the hall!” For me, I preferred walking into a school knowing nobody (out of state) and instantly making some of the best friends I’ve ever had, always having a place to party, and probably most importantly: knowing no matter what there was somewhere I belonged.

Being Greek probably isn’t for everyone, but the rampant (and escalating) criticism of an organization that results in lifelong friends, higher average GPAs, mandated philanthropy, and powerful connections extending from the house to the corporate world, is rooted in jealousy and total misunderstanding. If you are given the opportunity to join, even if it’s “not that big of a deal” at your school, at least go through the process and make a decision for you, not what Aunt Katherine (who supports Bernie because Hillary is “too conservative”) says..