YOUR FIRST FOUR MONTHS
TurkeyClubNoTomatoes
Gather round dear freshman, right now you’re probably sitting in a dining hall thinking about who you want to be - because this is a time that shapes you. This is your chance to make a good first impression on the people you’re stuck with for the next four years. You will look back on your freshman fall for the rest of your life and talk about how crazy it was, and I’m sure you believe that. In any case, we’ve written our prediction of your totally unique, one-of-a-kind, never done before freshman fall.
September - Camp Yale is over, classes have just started, you’re still trying to figure out your routine and deciding who you want to be in college. You will sign up for a club’s mailing list but never attend a meeting, you might try out for acapella because for some reason it’s so normalized here, but mostly, you will apply for club after club and receive rejection after rejection - you go numb after the third one don't worry. You will go to SigChi (more times than you would like to admit) before you become a High Street regular, don’t worry we’ve all been there. You may even end up at ChiPsi one night but deny that fact til you graduate. You will hear whispers of words like Edon and Fence and marvel at these top secret mysterious underground frats. If you’re lucky, you’ll have to sexile your roommate, and if you’re not lucky, they’ll sexile you. You want to sexile them first so you can establish yourself as the alpha of the suite, but be warned, every hookup that occurs within the first two months of freshman year becomes public knowledge a day later. Also you will get so violently ill, and no Yale Health won’t do shit about it.
October - October break is soon approaching and I suggest you make yourself a list of all your best New York friends and start bribing them for an invitation to stay with them over October break. Everyone, and their long distance, low commitment, high school girl/boyfriend, is going to be in Manhattan. As Halloweekend approaches, you will either have secured your Hallowoads ticket as soon as the link dropped, or forgot to and will now be paying 10x face value to get sweaty at Toad’s in a costume. Group costumes will test the strength of your new-found friendships, as everyone wants to go as the Scooby Doo gang but no one wants to be the dog. The first set of midterms is also probably starting and people will be introduced to the gift from God that is the Econ curve (because everyone you know is taking Intro Micro). And you’re probably still sick!
November - Harvard-Yale is coming up and you’re trying to either find a friend over there to crash with because leaving all your stuff in a random common room in Cambridge isn’t exactly your favorite idea. You will leave Harvard with a new sense of Yale pride, not just because we win the game, which we probably will (thank you Josh Pitsenberger TD ‘26), but because you will learn that Harvard is extremely fucking boring. You might venmo $20 bucks to get into a party hosted in the basement of a burger shop, you might Uber to the MIT frats just for something to do, in extreme cases people have dipped all together and gone to the movies (since there’s no cinema in New Haven), but it will likely be a lot of wandering around the streets of Boston, hoping a car comes and hits you. You may stop coughing when you go home, but when you come back it will start again!
December - Ah December, the semester is coming to a close. Everyone is preparing for finals, and as hard as it already was to get a room in Bass, it gets about 50x harder. But exams aren’t the only reason people are lining the libraries. The Naked Run is at midnight on the last day of reading period, and it’s a great opportunity for Yale’s biggest virgins (if you’re reading Rumpus - that’s probably you!) to see what a vagina looks like in real life! You never really know what to expect from a naked run: you could see your team captains, you could see your frocos, and you could see a guy attempt a cartwheel but fail and cause a naked domino effect. You’ll be sad leaving for the first time, in shock that you only have 7 semesters left, but as soon as you get home and shower barefoot again - all the sadness will wash away. Your Yague will go away, and possibly never return, after your first semester you kind of build up a tolerance.
A final word of advice, you are probably seeing groups of people who already seem like best friends after a week, and wondering how you can join their group. Pro tip: you can’t! Camp Yale friend groups are impenetrable, so best you stop embarrassing yourself and stick to your suitemates till you find someone better.