Summer is usually a fun time. It’s the time of the year when people actually seem happy, especially if they happen to live in Ohio all year long! Summer is great for college students when they can go home and be with their families, eat good home food and laze around. But when you’re working on a college campus, summer becomes a food hunt where starving zombies are constantly competing with each other for survival.

The summer survival kit in America includes a lot of hot pockets, ramen noodles and other very unhealthy, tasty, microwaveable stuff that costs less than $2 a pack. #Maruchanhassavedmorelivesthanyoucanimagine

You’re either lucky and get your own kitchen or, you’re stuck with a common floor or worse, dorm kitchen, the latter is more probable of course. Then, you may either have a fridge in your room (but it could be too small) or you have to use the common fridge in the darn common kitchen.

That’s when the fun begins. If you don’t label stuff, it will disappear. If you label stuff, it will still disappear. My roommate told me she had to write things like, “I have Mono. Do not touch my food” and sometimes it worked. But sometimes, people were ready to risk the Mono :’)

Another friend told me about a pizza incident. She walked all the way to a grocery store in the small town of Wooster to get two pizzas that she could heat and eat later on. She kept them in the common dorm fridge. Later that evening, one of them was gone. She seemed disappointed because not only was her food stolen, but also the summer zombie actually made a choice, like “Hey, this seems like a better topping choice to steal. Let’s leave the less-appealing one for the owner.”

There was also a story about a student who lived on JUST CANDY for a week and then obviously fainted and was taken to the emergency room!

So, summer can be tough. It is a struggle when dining halls are shut, and/or meal plans are too expensive and you have to fetch for your own food after hours of working (either without access to a proper kitchen or a lack of one + meager salaries for anybody who brings up the “What do you think parents do?” argument!).

Every time there is free dinner, a famished student will run for it with or without a connection.

During the summer, students break rules. They eat things they had not eaten or vowed never to eat before. It is quite similar to a zombie apocalypse where students block out every other brain activity to focus on the food!

So, “Summer Student Zombies” is a thing people. Walking Dead could come up with a spin-off on the poor, forever starved, summer-time college students and maybe I’ll actually watch the show for once :P

My parents and friends back home get worried sometimes about all the junk I seem to consume during my summers on campus. But there really is no way around it. You gotta do what you gotta do! And it is actually very adventurous and somehow helps you bond with all the other zombies on campus. So, yeah summer is indeed fun. We turn into cruel living corpses but we all know in a Humans vs Zombies race, we’d like to be zombies, at least for part of the year?

To every other student floating in the same boat: I hear ya. Just go buy some cheap ice cream and treat yourself. Don’t forget to label it though and get creative with labels because otherwise we’ll be one zombie down!