How To: Junior Parent's Weekend

It is Junior Parents Weekend, or JPW as your acronym-loving friend likes to call it.

It’s time to take mom and pop to Harvest and remind them why they are paying so much money to send you to school 5,000 miles away—they only want to see you once a year. But when they aren’t buying you fancy food, things might get awkward. Luckily, I have some advice to keep your parents happily distracted during their stay.

Take them to class

Not your class—that would be idiotic. Your parents can’t know that they are spending over $50,000 a year for you to skip your Culture and Belief section and your TF can’t know that both of your parents are alive— you used your mom’s terminal coma as an excuse to get an extension on that paper. Instead, take your parents to a class that sounds impressive and where the TF won’t recognize you, like Applied Math 141r or anything that meets before 10am.

Blame the roommate

You probably should have cleaned your room before they came, but then again, you probably shouldn’t have had the drug paraphernalia and empty bottles to begin with—it’s tacky. I don’t personally have this problem but I do have a solution: blame your roommate. It’s easy; all you have to do is lie shamelessly. For example, “Sorry Mom, I don’t know why Luke hung that demeaning poster of a naked woman above my desk—I’d talk to him about it taking it down, but I want to respect his personal space.”

Don’t introduce them to high achieving friends

You don’t want your parents to start comparing you to your consulting roommate or your friend who just applied to law school. So only introduce your parents to people who will make you look good, like the Resident Dean’s two-year-old son, or the squirrel that hangs around the courtyard. On second thought, that squirrel might be rabid, so just stick to the kid—I hear he still wets the bed.

Get them blackout

They say a family that drinks together stays together, so think of how close you will be after acute alcohol induced anterograde amnesia. The next day you can fill in your parents on what they forgot. You did have that talk about your credit card bill, and that your dad is still totally okay with paying it. The “I heart Linda” matching tattoos might be a little harder to explain, but then again, that might just be because your mother’s name is Jane.