Love It: Prefrosh Weekend

It’s Friday night, 11 p.m., and you’re walking back to your dorm room from Lamont, excited for a quiet and restful night off. You round the corner of Mass Ave and Plympton, and you’re suddenly confronted with a massive, buzzing cluster of pubescent high schoolers, sporting sweatshirts and toting Rubinoff-filled gatorate bottles. “Yo, man,” says the self-delcared leader, “know of any parties going on tonight?” You run off before you’re forced to respond. Welcome to prefrosh weekend.

Sure, many of us dread prefrosh weekend; there’s nothing more annoying than a crowd of overeager teenage nerds desperately praying that they can pass for an undergrad as they nervously make their way through the square. But I consider the weekend a time for us college kids to reflect on how far we’ve come. It wasn’t so long ago that many of us wandered through the unfamiliar streets of Cambridge ourselves, imagining the endless possibilities of scintillating lectures, keg parties, late-night debates over Lolita in hipster coffee shops, and access to endless alcohol, or at least a really good fake ID. Of course, the reality turns out to be a little different, and it’s nice to be reminded of our former naivete.

But perhaps these prefrosh are on to something. Whatever happened to that sense of hope and possibility that we once had? Have we grown numb or is college really not all that we had anticipated? Have we learned anything since we’ve been here? Where has that sense of ambition and confidence gone? And then, just when you’re about to doubt our entire college experience, you hear a prefrosh puking in the bathroom down the hall, and are reminded that yes, you have in fact grown, matured, and learned at least one invaluable piece of information: beer before liquor, never been sicker.