The start of a new school year means waiting for hours in a seemingly endless line, wrapping around every nook and display in Barnes and Noble before inevitably spilling out the door and onto High Street, to buy a $200 dollar, 400 page book you’ll use three times in the semester (if you’re lucky). It means campus bar patios overflowing with students for seven days straight; the only partially legitimate excuse of ‘syllabus week’ on everyone’s lips. But more than anything the beginning of a new school year means a fresh onslaught of bright eyed new students shamelessly sticking to the buddy, or small army, system delegated to them by older and wiser resident hall advisors.

As an upperclassman, freshman are anything but incognito, easily distinguished by their directionally challenged wandering and inability to form a sufficient answer to the question, “who do you know here?” 

Some college veterans find the newcomers nuisances. They see the recent high school grads walking around in packs of six plus people and can’t help but curse them under their breath for taking up the whole sidewalk. These quick to anger sophomores, juniors and seniors justify their short tempers by convincing themselves that they never partook in such behavior their first year on campus, and use this justification as reason to mock the young bucks from roof tops and deny them entrance to parties.  

Other upperclassman don’t deny their freshman roots, but rather revel in the days of dining hall dates and dorm room sleepovers. To this group the sight of freshman is an invitation to reminiscence on better days when every party was amazing merely because it wasn’t confined to the basement of your friends' parent’s home, and the looming threat of graduation and the real world was still four years away. These students will migrate towards the frosh, wooing them with their wisdom and collegiate anecdotes in order to secure an invitation to hang out in the dorms or get swiped at Sloopy’s.   

In my opinion, the average college student falls into one of these two opposing categories when it comes to their opinion of the new freshman class. I’m not sure which emotional response illicit by the class of 2018 is better than the other, but they certainly cannot be ignored.