Insights for first-year Domers
Marlayna Soenneker
Viewpoint Columnist
The powers that be here at our campus newspaper have asked me to write a column for the Freshman Orientation edition of the paper. They asked me specifically because I am a sophomore now, making me just one short, yet important, summer past being a freshman myself. This, they figure, puts me in a better position to give the new freshmen a bit of insight into our humble University. So get ready for some serious insight.
First of all, you, as freshmen, will get welcomed to death. There will be welcome-to-class welcomes, welcome-to-school welcomes, welcome-to-real-life welcomes, welcome-to-the-dorm welcomes, welcome-to-the-chapel welcomes, welcome-to-the-football-games welcomes, welcome-to-the-gym welcomes, welcome-to-the-quad welcomes and even welcome-to-the-dining-hall welcomes. You will almost feel unwelcome when you go to bed and no one welcomes you there.
You have probably had many of these welcomes already, but it gets better. You will be welcomedmany times! Sometimes by the same people! Sometimes in the same conversation! The welcoming here literally never ends. And when you finally end your freshman year and think, "Well, at least the welcoming is over," you'll be wrong! Because when you return, you have to be welcomed back!
Everyone you meet wants to shake your hand. If you are one of those people who is phobic about touching people because of germs, you should go home now. You'll never survive. Everyone will also want to know your name, dorm, home-town and major. Now, you should know the first three of those pretty definitively. If you don't, you should probably start worrying.
However, you probably aren't sure of your major. This is fine. Whenever you talk to a non-student, such as a professor or parent, you should lie and make up a major. Otherwise you are likely to get 9,534,873 kind-hearted lectures about how it is really okay not to be sure about your major and how you have plenty of time. So pretend you know your major. When you finally figure it out, you can just pretend that you are "changing" your major. Since you will really do that five or six times in the next four years, no one will know the difference.
Now, some of you will be homesick. If you are a homesick person, there will be times when you will look at the next year and think that it is going to last forever. And it will. It will also last approximately a week and a half. While you are living through it, sometimes the year seems to take forever. But at the end of the year, you will look back and think, "That was a nice couple of weeks," and probably refuse to believe that it was actually an entire school year.
But I jump ahead of myself. Many things will happen before the end of the year that I should share insight about. Perhaps most importantly, there will be the football games which you have to go to. Sometimes on football weekends, you almost get the feeling that God Himself will be annoyed at you if you don't go to the game, and that it may affect your chances of getting into Heaven. Which it may. I suspect He is a pretty hard-core Notre Dame fan.
However, the real reason you have to go to the football games is because whenever you leave South Bend and people find out you go to Notre Dame, they will expect a three-to-five minute oral report on the football season. This should include a theory on why the season went the way it did, information on one-to-three players that you particularly liked, and at least one personal story about a game. So start thinking about this soon — October break is only two months away.
There are also a lot of parties around here. When you came to visit campus last year (or three years ago, if your parents knew even then where you would be going), the tour guide probably attempted to reassure your parents that Notre Dame wasn't really a big drinking school. Well, the tour guide lied. You will most certainly not be deprived of that aspect of the college experience. Even the state schools have nothing on us when it comes to parties, except possibly sheer frequency. (Some nights we have to study.)
We also have those wonderful rules called parietals. No insightful Freshman Orientation column would be complete without something about those. Parietals are the administration's way of keeping Notre Dame guys, who, as we all know, become rapists and murderers at 12:00 a.m. on weekdays and 2:00 a.m. on weekends, away from the poor defenseless little girls.
Really, parietals are the administration's attempt to make themselves and our parents believe they are doing something strong to stop sexual activity on campus. Despite their ineffectiveness on that front, the administration certainly does mean what they say about parietals, and it is best not to get caught breaking them. A lengthy meeting with ResLife about the rest of your four years of college is not the best way to start your freshman year.
Let's see. What else is there around here? Oh, yes. Between football games, parties, parietals, and welcoming sessions, you will actually be asked to attend classes. Which you should certainly do. After all, when you call home you can't really tell your parents about the parties, so you'll need some classes to discuss.
I'll hand out one last insight before I stop, and it is simply this. Don't worry. Notre Dame is a good place to be. You'll have fun. I promise.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
Marlayna Soenneker is a sophomore at Notre Dame. She lives in Welsh Family Hall.
All Viewpoint Stories for Saturday, August 19, 2000
