The moment I decided that DePauw was right for me happened on a Saturday night, two years ago on the front porch of SAE.

Even back then, SAE wasn't known for throwing consistent ragers...but as I recall, there had been a decent one earlier that night. By three or four in the morning, things had wound down to the point that it was just me and a friend named Steve on the porch, talking about books. Steve and I were both writing majors. Steve was telling me about Ernest Hemingway and encouraging me to read For Whom the Bell Tolls. "It sounds pretty cool, but I can’t say Hemingway’s name without feeling a little pretentious," I admitted.

Steve chugged what was left of his forty before saying, "Look at us, Parker. If there was ever a situation to talk about Hemingway without having to feel pretentious, this might be it. Besides," he added, "if he was here, he'd probably be way more hammered than either of us."

I imagined Ernest Hemingway holding a forty and gleefully pissing into the hedges beside us. Somehow the image fit. "This is exactly what I was hoping for when I came to DePauw," I thought out loud. "I just like being able to drink and dick around one minute, and still have intelligent conversations the next."

"The trick is learning to do both at the same time," he said with a smile.

"Here, here," I agreed, raising my bottle to toast. 

Steve looked at his empty hands and then all around him before asking "Where the hell did my drink go?"

Steve no longer goes to DePauw, and I've only got one year left. Saying that I have mixed feelings about leaving would be redundant. After graduation, I doubt I’ll ever again see the kinds of parties that I did here, and I have almost come to accept that fact. This year, DePauw held onto its ranking in the Princeton Review’s list of the Top 20 Party Schools, an accomplishment that deserves to be celebrated. 

I was disappointed when President Casey issued an apology letter last year for our continued placement on the list, because doing so denied the fundamental duality that makes our school so unique. DePauw has shown that learning a lot and having a good time don’t have to be mutually exclusive. If I just wanted to go to a party school, I'd have gone to Arizona State. If I just wanted academics, I'd have gone to Harvard (or, you know, the closest thing that I could've actually gotten into). I wanted both, which is why I came to DePauw.

DePauw is the smallest school on the Princeton Review list, which I believe is a major reason why there aren’t separate demographics of nerds and partiers like there might be at a bigger school. I’ve always admired the fact that the best and brightest DePauw students frequently go out and get wild with the rest of us. I love the feeling of doing stupid things with smart people. We've got a tiny little Stars Hollow-esque community of close-knit oddballs and eccentrics. But despite our differences, almost all of us like to go out and have a good time, and I hope that never changes.