Bobby D'Angelo
Going to school down south is what the college experience is depicted as in movies. Picturesque campuses full of blonde girls with long legs, overwhelming school spirit, and bar strips with alcohol establishments that are so easy to gain entry to that a piece of paper mache would pass as identification. I mean, I’m not even joking; Kroger (if you’re a Yankee it’s southern ShopRite) implemented a special needs program where people with special needs scan your ID when you purchase alcohol- nobody talks about that enough. If you find yourself at a University south of the Mason Dixon line, a freshman girl isn’t asking what’s your major; she’s asking, what Frat are you in? Not being in a fraternity down south is like going to art school without a polaroid camera, you will always be on the outside looking in. Kids with pictures of them holding a fish on their Tinder profile are actively destroying mansions that rich alumni destroyed long before them. It’s glorious. Elevators are so sticky with piss that there’s a millisecond where a passenger might genuinely believe his New Balances are permanently welded to the ground. The girls join sororities that they end up hating by Sophomore year and spend the rest of their college years searching for a slightly overweight guy with just enough facial hair to bear their child. But it’s not like there aren’t cons. Kids from the south are plain and simple, not as funny as their northern counterparts. It requires serious levels of deteriorating mental health to be a hilarious kid, and there is too much vitamin C in the south for that. People walk slow as fuck, and fraternities are about as ethnically diverse as a Zac Brown Band concert. A southern school’s auxiliary cord is sporadic and weird. How in the fuck do you consciously queue Fisher after listening to The Best Of: Kenny Chesney. These kids are from homes where god and football are kings, and they see college as the peak of their existence.
The North has an element of grit. There’s something so beautiful about seeing a girl that goes to Wisco out on a lake drinking a seltzer in ten-degree weather. Up North, turning twenty-one is an actual privilege, and your underclassmen experience is spent sweaty in basements, with punch that may or may not have some secret ingredients in it. Kids up north actually have friends outside of their fraternity because they had to wait to rush until their Sophomore years. Girls are less attractive and wear more makeup, but they have exceptionally better personalities. It’s a common occurrence to see sorority girls risk hypothermia to make their tits pop, and that’s a level of scrappiness you HAVE to respect. The money up North is also different. Down south, you have Dad’s that belong to a country club. Up north, you have Dad’s that OWN the country clubs. People are meaner, but they speak their truth. Campuses are about as clean as your friend’s older brother, who got into heroin at a young age. It smells bad, it’s dirty, but there’s nothing better. Guys smoke cigarettes inside while wearing hockey jerseys. Wherever you are up north, you can find a good slice of pizza in a one-mile radius. The food is incredible, and bars typically don’t have big cover charges (fuck you, Rounders). A fraternity GroupMe anywhere north of Virginia will make you laugh hysterically and also make you want to kill yourself. Kids bag on each other RUTHLESSLY, and nothing is off-limits. There’s no pageantry where girls feel the need to take pictures at a certain campus landmark. Kids lie, cheat, and fight, but they are considerably more entertaining to get messed up with. But northern kids will always look enviously at their friends; there’s no vice versa. There are too many fucking rules, the cops actually punish people, and the bars are shitty.
There’s no right answer for which kind of school is the better fit; actually there is, SEC schools that northerners flock to. If you want to do college right, go SEC.
