Getting oriented

Overwhelmed freshmen and their bewildered parents are aimlessly wandering this campus like lost sheep and, fittingly, attending meetings in mass herds. Watching this sad display of behavior makes me the opposite of nostalgic for when I was in their shoes. If there’s one piece of advice I could give to reassure these nervous mobs that they aren’t making a horrible mistake, it would be this: Your experience at orientation is no indication of what your college experience will be like. \nThe first night of my orientation was unscheduled so we could socialize with other desperately lonely students, most of whom we would never see again. The first person I met was my orientation roommate, who proceeded to smoke two packs of cigarettes in two hours. Later that night I found myself taking a walk around campus with the most hodge-podge group of people you can imagine. (Picture the scene in “Toy Story 2” with all the broken toys hanging out together, and that’s a pretty accurate visual.) So that’s how it came to be that my first adventure at IU included a gangster, a redneck, a beauty queen and a skinny emo boy with a mohawk who was trying to score cocaine off us.\nThe second day consisted of a series of meetings and class registration, but my strongest memory is of a group of us being forced to play the game “Telephone” as an icebreaker. Against all odds, the message made it all the way around intact: “There’s a party in my pants and you’re invited.” When the last person said it out loud, we all giggled uproariously as though we were third graders at a co-ed sleep-away camp rather than ambitious young adults pursuing a higher education at an acclaimed academic institution.\nLater that night we had to attend a talk and series of skits on the topic of how to avoid getting savagely raped at parties. The statistics they threw at us horrified me, and I decided right then and there that I would never attend a party, eat in a public place, make friends or leave my dorm room.\nI got back to my room at 10 that night, checked seven times to make sure my door was locked to guard against rapists and went to bed. I was awoken at 5 a.m. by the return of my roommate.\n“Julia!” she shouted drunkenly.\n“What?” I groaned.\n“You know how, at that talk tonight about how to avoid getting raped, they gave us that list of things not to do?”\n“Uh-huh.”\n“I just did all of them!” she said, falling into her bed ecstatically. “It was so much fun! I ended up in Tennessee, smoking free dope with these really hot 30-year-old men.”\nI’m not making any of this up.\nFreshman orientation was one of the most disorienting things ever to happen to me, and that’s saying a lot. If you are an incoming freshman, aim to simply tolerate the experience rather than expecting to find any genuine enjoyment. Rest assured that your real fresh start will come in the fall.