A senior’s semester

So it's the last Misc issue before Winter Break, which means that the torrential flood of lies and slander will finally, blessedly, stop. Even after seven semesters at Vassar there are still plenty of things I don't know: who runs VCStudentBodies, how Blodgett works, why the staff at Baldwin thinks I've been perma-pregnant for the past four straight years. But here are some tidbits I've managed to learn about this oh-so-precious final year, gleaned from all the time I've spent lolling around campus/actually my bed because I only have class four times a week. #SENIORS!!

1. Parties.

By the time you are a senior, you will only go to two or three parties, but you will go to them every single weekend. Maybe your preferred group is the baseball team or drama majors or the Jane Austen Book Club. Regardless of who you choose to spend time with, you'll learn their patterns so well that you'll be able to script each conversation that will take place over the course of the night.

Guy: So have I told you about my internship at Goldman Sachs this past summer? Pretty chill.

Girl: Yeah, you did! Eight times!

(Guy and Girl start macking furiously.)

You will tell gaggles of freshmen that Security is coming, just for sport. Games of Never Have I Ever will devolve into cold, calculated attempts to single out your one friend who once had sex in a barn. Never will your bathtub not ever smell like Crystal Palace and Country Time Lemonade again.

2. Senior housing.

Taking 600 21-year-olds and dropping them unceremoniously into a bunch of apartments is like backing a dumptruck full of wompwomps into Sunset Lake. Some will struggle to stay afloat, some will breaststroke like pros and some will clamber on top of each other in a frenzy of fur and claws, shoving wompwomps previously thought to be their friends all the way to the murky, cancerous bottom. Similarly, there are all kinds of ways senior housing can work. (Or not.) I recommend a chore wheel, Christmas lights and enough communal booze that all of your housemates are perpetually tipsy to the point where they don't care when you leave your spaghetti-carbonara-encrusted plates in the sink for so long that they develop their own itty-bitty ecosystems. BONUS PRO TIP: Maybe probably try to learn to cook a dish that isn't spaghetti carbonara. Or find an underclassman to seduce and make him/her/zir swipe you into the Deece whenever you're feeling peckish.

3. Academics.

Oh yeah that. Your classes will be completely lopsided: half intros where you're the only person old enough to drink, half seminars that require you to compose Moodle novellas before each meeting. You'll either monopolize all discussion (without having bothered to buy a copy of Anna Karenina or whatever over-hyped rag you happen to be talking about that day) or lurk lumpenly at the back of the classroom, slouching in eight minutes after class starts because the THs are just. So. Far. At all times you will be carrying a Mason jar full of sun tea. You'll talk about your thesis like it's some weird little gnome who lives under your bed but who you've come to love begrudgingly for his singular crabby brand of wisdom.

Thesis: Don't go tongue-kiss with that dumb loser who won't STFU about Goldman Sachs! Stay here and hang out with me. We still have one more chapter about agroeconomic development in post-industrial Kiribati to finish by Monday.

Girl: You're right, Thesis, I'd totally rather stay at home tonight. Thanks a bunch.

Thesis: Besides, you have to anyway or your world will end.

4. Real life.

A senior's favorite game to play is a rousing round of "So What Are Your Plans For Next Year?" Really gets the old heart rate up. It seems like everyone you've ever met is starting to hear back about job recruitment and grad school and all you want is to find someone who will pay you a modest fortune to write haikus about eating. But that's why they invented Winter Break: for curling up on the couch in your zebra-print Snuggie and ignoring fellowship applications until the night before they're due, for drinking three bottles of champagne with the only friend from high school you still talk to, for asking your parents for Anthropologie giftcards for Hanukkah instead of, like, the down payment for your future apartment. We don't even graduate until May, team—we could be 40 by then!