Anyone who is dividing their college experience into what year they are in is still in the first two stages of college. Everyone after that knows that college is divided amongst seven stages. These are determined by academic effort, social standing, and alcohol consumption.
Blind Excitement
Every freshman has some level of excitement when arriving on campus. Maybe you want to meet new friends, be independent from your parents, or attempt to live out the plot of Animal House with the dumbest guys on your floor. Either way, the first stage of college is undeniably the part when you are so excited to be there that you don’t know how to spend your time. You don’t know who to drink with, or where to go to find a nice young lady to share a twin bed with, which makes the process of finding out quite invigorating.
The Patchwork Friend Group
Once you have a group of friends that you know well enough to create a named group chat, you guys are official. Once this happens, take attendance. The group is not going to look like this for very long. As you begin to socialize with the rest of the campus, someone will find a group they like better, or sleep with someone’s crush. It doesn’t matter. Your first group of college friends will dissolve, and it send you to the next stage of college life.
Seasoned Alcoholic
This is essentially the prime of your college career. At this point, you have likely found the group of people who you will pregame with until graduation, or until Dan and Katie break up. During this stage, your night is more about getting blind drunk than it is about the people around you. Most stories you tell people will come from this stage of college. A fun night in this part of college is defined by remembering nothing.
Drop Out Daydreaming
If you are going at the suggested speed, you are probably somewhere around your third year at this point. You are no longer immune to hangovers, which means nights after drinking are filled more with anxiety than fun recaps from last night’s blackout. When you inevitably meet this adversity, you will fantasize about dropping out. Daydreaming about sleeping until noon will be thought that gets you through your 10 am, which is super early at this point in your life. The decision to drop out too much commitment though, so you are led to the next stage.
Chops
Tobacco and pot in a bowl, for those who haven’t succumbed to the smelly pastime yet. Most college students take up chops after they decide that staying in and playing Call of Duty has as much merit as an alcohol fueled social life. Your grimiest friend tried this in high school, and recently has been picking up packs of cigarettes to add some spice to his routine bong rips. You tried one, and after your coughing fit subsided, the head rush you got confirmed that you weren’t doing anything else for at least a semester.
Resume CPR
As college students get to their last year of college, they realize that they haven’t done anything of value since graduating high school. This is when people decide to get an internship, a job, or anything that can make it look like they were a functional member of society over their past few years. Since they haven’t, this is the stage where college students become desperate to fill their down time. A not so fun fact about this, is that most people in this stage tell you about their daily coffee runs for the small chance that you might give them validation.
Desperate Hostage
This is the part of college where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Your GPA is what it is at this point, so passing all of your classes is the only thing that matters. Odds are, you have left fraternity parties in your past, and are too broke for bars, so you pick a video game and get surgical at it. All you want to do is graduate, which somehow removes your motivation to open a book. By the time you walk across that stage, you want to grab the microphone and scream, “ANYTHING’S POSSIBLE,” like Kevin Garnett.
