Showered With Chocolate

The past weekend featured one of the biggest events of the year--the welcoming of a new Vassar class! And of course, just like every year, I got all nostalgic, teared up a little, and caused my friends to say, "Seriously, what's wrong with you? It's just a new batch of freshmen," which reminds me all over again that I'm graduating. Ugh.

But this being my last year of freshmen move in, I decided to make it a good one and take advantage of my favorite thing about special events on campus--the mountains upon mountains of free food (are we seeing a pattern here?). By videographing the experience for College Relations, I was able to take advantage of even the special access free food with the help of my official College Relations name tag, which further assured my lack of need for dinner that evening. To quote the student photographer I was working with that day, "It's one of the perks of the job."

I showered my campus patrol friends with free chocolate bars and thanked them for keeping the campus safe on move in day, then continued reliving my own freshman move in experience by relaxing in the shade with my video camera as my fellow students sweated beneath the weight of all of their worldly possessions. Ahh, the memories.

I remember moving in myself, although most of it is a blur. Current Vassar students help the freshman move in and find their rooms, as I volunteered to do my sophomore year. From what I remember, my family had barely opened the trunk of our antique, retro yellow station wagon after we pulled into the Cushing parking lot when suddenly all of my prized possessions had vanished. At the time I was kind of freaked out because it had happened so fast, but when I had to move in everything myself the next year, I realized exactly how hard it is to move in yourself, especially when you have no idea where you are. It's nice to have a few extra hands to help out, but unfortunately freshman year was the only time I had the priviledge.

During the tail end of my senior year of high school (at the point when my senioritis could have rivaled the plague), I met another prospective student over the Internet via the Vassar message boards (Facebook didn't exist at the time--which I know is hard to imagine). He thought I was french through my message board name, La Belle Dame Sans Merci (I'm not), but it didn't matter--we kind of hit it off through our mutual sense of humor and love of shredding metal, and I most likely spent all of my free time and most of what should have been my study time talking to him online about how awesome Vassar would be. As my point of departure from home neared, I wasn't sure if my Internet friendship could exist outside of cyberspace, until I found out we would be living six doors away from each other in the same hall. Talk about bizarre.

Together, we managed to form our own group of friends with other student fellow group misfits, nicknaming this group "The Posse." Together, we skipped scheduled orientation events, roamed around campus in disoriented packs, scarfed down copius amounts of food from the campus dining hall and talked smack about other dorms--all while the other new students were going to cool off-campus parties. Yeah, we were lame. As a matter of fact, we still are as we've managed to remain friends to this day.