Freshmen Quotes

To me, “FEARLESS” is not the absence of fear. It’s not being completely unafraid. To me, FEARLESS is having fears. FEARLESS is having doubts. Lots of them. To me, FEARLESS is living in spite of those things that scare you to death. FEARLESS is falling madly in love again, even though you’ve been hurt before. FEARLESS is walking into your freshmen year of high school at fifteen. FEARLESS is getting back up and fighting for what you want over and over again… even though every time you’ve tried before, you’ve lost. It’s FEARLESS to have faith that someday things will change. FEARLESS is having the courage to say goodbye to someone who only hurts you, even if you can’t breathe without them. I think it’s FEARLESS to fall for your best friend, even though he’s in love with someone else. And when someone apologizes to you enough times for things they’ll never stop doing, I think it’s FEARLESS to stop believing them. It’s FEARLESS to say “you’re NOT sorry”, and walk away. I think loving someone despite what people think is FEARLESS. I think allowing yourself to cry on the bathroom floor is FEARLESS. Letting go is FEARLESS. Then, moving on and being alright…That’sFEARLESS too. But no matter what love throws at you, you have to believe in it. You have to believe in love stories and prince charmings and happily ever after. That’s why I write these songs. Because I think love is FEARLESS.

I don’t understand you, Pigeon. I thought I knew women, but you’re so fucking confusing I don’t know which way is up.” “I don’t understand you, either. You’re supposed to be Eastern’s ladies’ man. I’m not getting the full freshmen experience they promised in the brochure,” I teased.

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

Last year I kissed this freshman girl at a pool party and she wouldn’t get off my nuts for six months. Which is why my policy is now no psychotics, and no freshmen. The freshmen thing is obviously easy to avoid, while the psychotics pose a bit more of a problem. It’s not like girls walk around with “I’m crazy” stamped on their chests.

See Scott run, Run Scott run. See Scott die, No such luck.

A pair of freshmen rushed by our door talking about who would make a better Gallagher Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Veronica Mars (a debate made much more interesting by the fact it was taking place in Farsi).

Let's face it - with a few exceptions, nobody likes anybody.

For the life of me I cannot remember, what made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise. For the life of me I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins, we were merely freshmen.

Reciprocity is not mandatory.

Athlete or not, I’m going to make sure you know how to read.

You’re important to me, you know,” I said, squeezing him. “I don’t understand you, Pigeon. I thought I knew women, but you’re so fucking confusing I don’t know which way is up.” “I don’t understand you, either. You’re supposed to be Eastern’s ladies’ man. I’m not getting the full freshmen experience they promised in the brochure,” I teased. “Well, that’s a first. I’ve never had a girl sleep with me to get me to leave her alone,” he said, keeping his back to me.

Other freshmen were already moving into their dormitory rooms when we arrived, with their parents helping haul. I saw boxes of paperbacks, stereo equipment, Dylan albums and varnished acoustic guitars, home-knitted afghans, none as brilliant as mine, Janis posters, Bowie posters, Day-Glo bedsheets, hacky sacks, stuffed bears. But as we carried my trunk up two flights of stairs terror invaded me. Although I was studying French because I dreamed of going to Paris, I actually dreaded leaving home, and in the end my parents did not want me to leave, either. But this is how children are sacrificed into their futures: I had to go, and here I was. We walked back down the stairs. I was too numb to cry, but I watched my mother and father as they stood beside the car and waved. That moment is a still image; I can call it up as if it were a photograph. My father, so thin and athletic, looked almost frail with shock, while my mother, whose beauty was still remarkable, and who was known on the reservation for her silence and reserve, had left off her characteristic gravity. Her face and my father's were naked with love. It wasn't something thatwe talked about—love. But they allowed me this one clear look at it. It blazed from them. And then they left.

You know what guys do? They stand up for people. You know why? Two reasons. It's right. And it feels good. Even if the person doesn't know what you did. Maybe especially then.

But at least this got Mouth thinking about how his loneliness wasn't unique. We all suffered. And I guess we all had good times too. Man - if every person who ever felt lonely killed himself, the world would be littered with corpses. And far lonelier.

This place is going to be destroyed in the morning. The cleanup crew is going to be busy." "You have a cleanup crew?" "Yeah", he smiled, "We call them freshmen.

Mr. Worthington, I understand that you do not control Chuck and Jasper. But you see, I am in a similar situation. I do not control the little devil sitting on my left shoulder. The devil is saying, "PRINT THE PICTURE PRINT THE PICTURE TAPE IT UP ALL OVER SCHOOL DO IT DO IT DO IT." And then on my right shoulder, there is a little tiny white angel. And the angel is saying, "Man, I sure as shit hope all those freshmen get their money bright and early on Monday morning." So do I, little angel. So do I. Best Wishes, Your friendly Neighboorhood Nemesis.

In less than an hour I have to hold class for a group of idiot freshmen. And, on a desk in the living room, is a mountain of midterm examinations with essays I must suffer through, feeling my stomach turn at their paucity of intelligence, their adolescent phraseology. And all that tripe, all those miles of hideous prose, had been would into an eternal skein in his head. And there it sat unraveling into his own writing until he wondered if he could stand the thought of living anymore. I have digested the worst, he thought. Is it any wonder that I exude it piecemeal? (“Mad House”)

You know what guys do? They stand up for people.

A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man!

When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I’d woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.

In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine.

Langdon always ended this lecture with a reminder that Arab culture had also given mankind the word al-kuhl—the favorite beverage of Harvard freshmen—known as alcohol.

Here’s a guess: anybody who bothers to change his name in the name of economic success is—like the high-school freshmen in Chicago who entered the school-choice lottery—at least highly motivated, and motivation is probably a stronger indicator of success than, well, a name.

In the world of pop stardom, what is mistaken for rebellion? A mediocre artist who spouts political beliefs that most freshmen in high school could have come up with after huffing Glade.

In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” 37 percent to be “very well-off financially” (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively. For well over thirty years, we’ve been loudly announcing that happiness is money, with a side order of fame. No wonder students have come to believe that college is all about getting a job.

Hey, ass-hats!” We bolt to our feet when Coach Jensen’s commanding voice snaps toward the bleachers. Our fearless leader—the only Briar faculty member who can get away with calling students “ass-hats”—glares at us from the ice. “Is there a reason your lazy asses are up in those seats when you should all be in the weight room?” he booms. “Quit stalking my practice!” Then he turns to scowl at the trio of freshmen who are snickering behind their gloves. “What’re you ladies laughing at? Hustle!” The players speed forward as if the ice behind them is cracking to pieces. Up in the stands, the guys and I hustle just as fast.

I opened the door expecting to find something really horrible inside, and I did: eight freshmen, all of whom turned and stared at me like a herd of small and especially pitiful deer about to be mown down by a massive lorry.

How to make twenty freshmen hyperactive: 1. Give them access to an espresso machine. 2. Offer them a safe haven after seventy-two hours of running from death. 3. Feed them a home-cooked meal made by an orangutan. 4. Tell them that tomorrow, they will get to see a make-believe submarine from the 1800s that is actually not make-believe.

But you see, I am in a similar situation. I do not control the little devil sitting on my left shoulder. The devil is saying, "PRINT THE PICTURE PRINT THE PICTURE TAPE IT UP ALL OVER SCHOOL DO IT DO IT DO IT." And then on my right shoulder, there is a little tiny white angel. And the angel is saying, "Man, I sure as **** hope all those freshmen get their money bright and early on Monday morning." So do I, little angel. So do I.

the test scores used in admissions are a measure of what colleges take in, not what they produce. The fact that an Ivy League school has freshmen with high SAT scores tells us that it is a good magnet for talent but nothing else. What should matter is how students, including those with low SAT scores, improve over the course of their time in school.

Algebra-Read pages 7-14. Do the odd numbered problems. From what I've seen, they're all pretty odd.

Universities are full of knowledge; the freshmen bring a little in and the seniors take none away, and knowledge accumulates.

German authorities saw the need for a statute explicitly forbidding anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine,

how happy individuals were as college freshmen predicted how high their income was nineteen years later, regardless of their initial level of wealth.

freshmen. Even among English speakers, then, geocentric terms may be used when the terrain offers a conspicuous visual frame of reference

You’ve heard the freshmen fifteen? Be prepared for the Shaw twenty.

I've been checking you out since we were freshmen." "Why??" "Do you even have to ask?" I laugh as a string of colorful handkerchiefs falls into my hand when I pull it from his pocket.

Although, as I watched him sleep, it occurred to me that he was way more attractive than I'd originally thought. He was my age-we were both freshmen-so I should've noticed, but his personality had somehow distracted me from the length of his eyelashes, the thickness of his dark hair, the prominence of his Adam's apple, and the way he had the tiniest little dimple in his chin. He was, objectively speaking, a very cute guy. "You checking me out, Glasses?" Gah! His eyes remained closed as he said, "Swear to God I can hear you holding your breath. Relax and exhale, kid; it's okay to creep on me." "As if," I growled, irritated that I'd gotten busted, because the last thing on earth I wanted to do was stroke his ego. "I just thought you might be dead." "Worried?" "Hopeful.

the scientific advances made by early Middle Eastern cultures, one of them being our modern numbering system, whose advantages over Roman numerals included ‘positional notation’ and the invention of the number zero. Of course, Langdon always ended this lecture with a reminder that Arab culture had also given mankind the word al-kuhl—the favorite beverage of Harvard freshmen—known as alcohol.

Hey, did you hear about Brad Miller?” he asked, already forgetting about the Lissie conversation. “He got his car taken away for getting another speeding ticket. Of course he tried to tell his parents it was a setup.” Violet laughed. “Yeah, because the police have nothing better to do than to plan a sting operation targeting eleventh-grade idiots.” She was more than willing to go along with this diversion from conversations about Jay and his many admirers. Jay laughed too, shaking his head. “You’re so cold-hearted,” he said to Violet, shoving her a little but playing along. “How’s he supposed to go cruising for unsuspecting freshmen and sophomores without a car? What willing girl is going to ride on the handlebars of his ten-speed?” “I don’t see you driving anything but your mom’s car yet. At least he has a bike,” she said, turning on him now. He pushed her again. “Hey!” he tried to defend himself. “I’m still saving! Not all of us are born with a silver spoon in our mouths.” They were both laughing, hard now. The silver spoon joke had been used before, whenever one of them had something the other didn’t. “Right!” Violet protested. “Have you seen my car?” This time she shoved him, and a full-scale war broke out on the couch. “Poor little rich girl!” Jay accused, grabbing her arm and pulling her down. She giggled and tried to give him the dreaded “dead leg” by hitting him with her knuckle in the thigh. But he was too strong, and what used to be a fairly even matchup was now more like an annihilation of Violet’s side. “Oh, yeah. Weren’t you the one”—she gasped, still giggling and thrashing to break free from his suddenly way-too-strong grip on her, just as his hand was almost at the sensitive spot along the side of her rib cage—“who got to go to Hawaii . . .” She bucked beneath him, trying to knock him off her. “. . . for spring break . . . last . . .” And then he startled to tickle her while she was pinned beneath him, and her last word came out in a scream: “YEAR?!” That was how her aunt and uncle found them.

For all his manwhoring, the guy has a strict rule about not doing freshmen. I’m not sure I blame him, considering our little stalker incident at the start of the year. Dean had hooked up with a freshman, who, after one night of exquisite passion, decided they were madly in love. She then proceeded to show up at our house at all hours of the day and night, sometimes wearing clothes, other times not wearing clothes, usually armed with flowers and love letters and—my personal favorite—a framed photo of herself wearing Dean’s hockey jersey. Sometimes when I’m falling asleep, I can still hear her wailing Deeeeeeeeean outside my window.

Top colleges turn out extraordinary graduates because they take in extraordinary freshmen. That tells very little about what happened in the intervening four years, except that it did not ruin these individuals completely. It tells even less about what would have happened if these same extraordinary people had been educated elsewhere. Whether a given individual will do better, either educationally or financially, by going to a bigname college is very doubtful. Hard

Wait. I will say something. This is too important. And if you don’t listen to anything else I tell you, I hope you’ll listen now. No matter what you might hear about all these tragic figures, and the whole romantic image of the suffering artist, suicide is not cool. It’s not heroic. It’s not romantic. It’s like running away. Abandoning your family. And leaving someone else to clean up your mess. Only, it’s even worse, because once you go there, you can’t come back. And that would really suck.

Did Mom notice you right away?" He shook his head. "Nope." "So what did you do?" "Showed up." "Where?" "Wherever." "So you showed up wherever she was?" "Or wherever she might be." "That must've taken a lot of time," I said. Dad shrugged. "Worth it.

We’re not so different, you and I. Sure, we may have different religious beliefs, political outlooks, sexual orientations, economic viewpoints, and artistic/literary/culinary tastes, but deep down we both want the same thing: To be loved by a beautiful being of light riding a glowing unicorn who just got named the dean of Liberal Arts at Harvard University (The unicorn’s the new dean, not the being of light), and it wants you to come up to Boston to teach Sexual Intercourse 101 to a select group of freshmen specifically chosen by you.

Now he was the freshmen in college while she was stuck in highschool being the sophomore. She was left behind hearing about him, watching his mom and dad at church on Sundays, and wishing she could move to a place where no one knew her that she was the only thing he didn't mind leaving behind...

Every student doffed his hat when the president approached, and bowed as he passed, or faced his wrath. Freshmen, meanwhile, acted as flunkies for the upperclassmen, who exacted a very painful form of punishment on those unwise enough to tell them where to go. The first priority, apart from striving to

This shift in culture has changed us. In the first place, it has made us a bit more materialistic. College students now say they put more value on money and career success. Every year, researchers from UCLA survey a nationwide sample of college freshmen to gauge their values and what they want out of life. In 1966, 80 percent of freshmen said that they were strongly motivated to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. Today, less than half of them say that. In 1966, 42 percent said that becoming rich was an important life goal. By 1990, 74 percent agreed with that statement. Financial security, once seen as a middling value, is now tied as students’ top goal. In 1966, in other words, students felt it was important to at least present themselves as philosophical and meaning-driven people. By 1990, they no longer felt the need to present themselves that way. They felt it perfectly acceptable to say they were primarily interested in money.20 We live in a more individualistic society. If

Algebra-Readpages 7-14. Do the odd numbered problems. From what I've seen, they're all pretty odd.

In 1998, the New York Times reported that “in the [annual UCLA] survey taken at the start of the fall semester, 74.9 percent of freshmen chose being well off as an essential goal and 40.8 percent chose developing a philosophy. In 1968, the numbers were reversed, with 40.8 percent selecting financial security and 82.5 percent citing the importance of developing a philosophy.”4

And it wasn't just their physical prowess. He liked the character of these particular freshmen. The boys who had made it this far were rugged and optimistic in a way that seemed emblematic of their western roots. They were the genuine article, mostly the products of lumber towns, dairy farms, mining camps, fishing boats, and shipyards. They looked, they walked, and they talked as if they had spent most of their lives out of doors. Despite the hard times and their pinched circumstances, they smiled easily and openly. They extended calloused hands eagerly to strangers. They looked you in the eye, not as a challenge, but as an invitation. They joshed you at the drop of a hat. They looked at impediments and saw opportunities. All that, Bolles knew, added up to a lot of potential...

At the University of California, San Diego the year before racial preferences were banned in the late 1990s, exactly one black student out of 3,268 freshmen made honors. A few years later after students who once would have been “mismatched” to Berkeley or UCLA were now admitted to schools such as UC San Diego, where one in five black freshmen were making honors, the same proportion as white ones.

Of course, all animals have different things to learn while traversing the arc that takes them from sexually immature, vulnerable child to reproductively capable, developed adult. In our case, those include advanced language skills and critical thinking. But there’s one feature that defines adolescence in species from condors to capuchin monkeys to college freshmen. It’s a time when they learn by taking risks and sometimes making mistakes.

The second follow-up, which examined changes in specialty, showed how often doctors of each type changed to a more typical specialty (to one more generally chosen by their type) and how often to one less typical. The results strikingly confirmed the conclusion suggested by the answers of the Auburn University freshmen that sensing types either know much less or care much less than do intuitives about the suitability of any given job for their type

I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That’s how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it’s enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.

Other people were so unsuccessful at fending off love! Members of Congress who had affairs with their aides, or students who I'd known in college, girls who as freshmen declared themselves lesbians, then graduated with boyfriends- to give in to such love represents, for them, a capitulation or a betrayal, yet apparently the pull was so strong that they couldn't resist. That was what I didn't understand, how people made the leap from not mattering in each others' lives to mattering.

I want,” freshman Senator Gale McGee wrote to Johnson, to take time to convey to you my deep personal appreciation for the committee assignments. Because of these appointments we freshmen have no alibis if by the end of this session we have failed to produce—in other days I suspect freshmen Senators have been able to excuse their early actions by the heavy hand of the old seniority system—but not now. Your action has given to us both individually and collectively both the responsibility and opportunity

At supper—the thirty piratical Digams sitting at a long and spotty table, devouring clam chowder and beans and codfish balls and banana layer-cake—the Freshmen earnestly repeated after a senior: On old Olympus' topmost top A fat-eared German viewed a hop. Thus by association with the initial letters they mastered the twelve cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, and the rest. To the Digams it was the world's noblest poem, and they remembered it for years after they had become practicing physicians and altogether forgotten the names of the nerves themselves.

Competitive rowing is an undertaking of extraordinary beauty preceded by brutal punishment. Unlike most sports, which draw primarily on particular muscle groups, rowing makes heavy and repeated use of virtually every muscle in the body, despite the fact that a rower, as Al Ulbrickson liked to put it, “scrimmages on his posterior annex.” And rowing makes these muscular demands not at odd intervals but in rapid sequence, over a protracted period of time, repeatedly and without respite. On one occasion, after watching the Washington freshmen practice, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Royal Brougham marveled at the relentlessness of the

Fatigue has built up after all this training, and I can’t seem to run very fast. As I’m leisurely jogging along the Charles River, girls who look to be new Harvard freshmen keep on passing me. Most of these girls are small, slim, have on maroon Harvard-logo outfits, blond hair in a ponytail, and brand-new iPods, and they run like the wind. You can definitely feel a sort of aggressive challenge emanating from them. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed. They all look so bright, so healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence. With their long strides and strong, sharp kicks, it’s easy to see that they’re typical mid-distance runners, unsuited for long-distance running. They’re more mentally cut out for brief runs at high speed. Compared to them I’m pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it. These random thoughts come to me as I watch their proud ponytails swinging back and forth, their aggressive strides. Keeping to my own leisurely pace, I continue my run down along the Charles. Have I ever had such luminous days in my own life? Perhaps a few. But even if I had a long ponytail back then, I doubt if it would have swung so proudly as these girls’ ponytails do. And my legs wouldn’t have kicked the ground as cleanly and as powerfully as theirs. Maybe that’s only to be expected. These girls are, after all, brand-new students at the one and only Harvard University. Still, it’s pretty wonderful to watch these pretty girls run. As I do, I’m struck by an obvious thought: One generation takes over from the next. This is how things are handed over in this world, so I don’t feel so bad if they pass me. These girls have their own pace, their own sense of time. And I have my own pace, my own sense of time. The two are completely different, but that’s the way it should be.

be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.

In a longitudinal study of college students, freshmen were evaluated for fixed mindsets or growth mindsets and then followed across their four years of enrollment. When the students with fixed mindsets encountered academic challenges such as daunting projects or low grades, they gave up, while the students with growth mindsets responded by working harder or trying new strategies. Rather than strengthening their skills and toughening their resolve, four years of college left the students with fixed mindsets feeling less confident. The feelings they most associated with school were distress, shame, and upset. Those with growth mindsets performed better in school overall and, at graduation time, they reported feeling confident, determined, enthusiastic, inspired, and strong.

I also spoke about the kid who can’t be bothered to get A’s in every class in high school because they’re actually more interested in following their curiosity, so here’s another rule of thumb. U.S. News supplies the percentage of freshmen at each college who finished in the highest 10 percent of their high school class. Among the top twenty universities, the number is usually above 90 percent, a threshold that is also reached at several of the top colleges. I’d be wary of schools like that (though I would make an exception for public universities, which draw from disadvantaged high schools from across their respective states). Not every ten-percenter is an excellent sheep, but a sufficient number are for you to think very carefully before deciding to surround yourself with them.

I turned and looked at her. She was a major in Costume Design and as such had all kinds of peculiar clothing in her room. “Is it yours?” I said. “I stole it from the wardrobe at the Costume shop. I was going to cut it up and make, like, a bustier out of it.” Great, I thought, but I went along with her anyway. The jacket, unexpectedly, was wonderful—old Brooks Brothers, unlined silk, ivory with stripes of peacock green—a little loose, but it fit all right. “Judy,” I said, looking at my cuffs. “This is wonderful. You sure you don’t mind?” “You can have it,” said Judy. “I don’t have time to do anything with it. I’m too busy sewing those dammed costumes for fucking As You Like It. It goes up in three weeks and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got all these freshmen working for me this term that don’t know a sewing machine from a hole in the ground.

The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the same time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddest times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived. It wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up working at Black Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the equation together. At the time, both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was working on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought that faces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists. That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more than that -- the gut reaction of a post-adolescent Army brat who had been on his own for about three weeks. His mind was good, but he only understood one or two things in the whole world --samurai movies and the Macintosh -- and he understood them far, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for someone like Juanita.

The terrible thing happened when the Board of Regents were being shown through the campus. The Regents were the supreme rulers of the University; they were bankers and manufacturers and pastors of large churches; to them even the president was humble. Nothing gave them more interesting thrills than the dissecting-room of the medical school. The preachers spoke morally of the effect of alcohol on paupers, and the bankers of the disrespect for savings-accounts which is always to be seen in the kind of men who insist on becoming cadavers. In the midst of the tour, led by Dr. Stout and the umbrella-carrying secretary of the University, the plumpest and most educational of all the bankers stopped near Clif Clawson's dissecting-table, with his derby hat reverently held behind him, and into that hat Clif dropped a pancreas. Now a pancreas is a damp and disgusting thing to find in your new hat, and when the banker did so find one, he threw down the hat and said that the students of Winnemac had gone to the devil. Dr. Stout and the secretary comforted him; they cleaned the derby and assured him that vengeance should be done on the man who could put a pancreas in a banker's hat. Dr. Stout summoned Clif, as president of the Freshmen. Clif was pained. He assembled the class, he lamented that any Winnemac Man could place a pancreas in a banker's hat, and he demanded that the criminal be manly enough to stand up and confess. Unfortunately the Reverend Ira Hinkley, who sat between Martin and Angus Duer, had seen Clif drop the pancreas. He growled, "This is outrageous! I'm going to expose Clawson, even if he is a frat-brother of mine." Martin protested, "Cut it out. You don't want to get him fired?" "He ought to be!" Angus Duer turned in his seat, looked at Ira, and suggested, "Will you kindly shut up?" and, as Ira subsided, Angus became to Martin more admirable and more hateful than ever.

Don't call me kid.” I pushed off of the wall, rage slithering through me. “This Academy might make me wear a uniform like a high school student, but I'm eighteen and I've looked after myself most of my life anyway. You think it would have been any different back there if I'd had a friend with me? We're freshmen. We're not trained to fight Nymphs.” Orion's jaw ticked as he absorbed my words. Eventually, he nodded, his eyes moving to look up at the tower. A baying howl sounded in the distance and he glanced over his shoulder. “The hunt's started, I should go and join them.” “Be careful,” I whispered. He looked back at me with a frown and something broken and desperate shone from his eyes for a moment. He blinked firmly and his expression morphed into a fierce scowl. “Stop looking at me like that,” he snarled and I fought the urge to recoil from his terrifying tone. “Like what?” “You know what,” he snapped. “I'm your teacher.” “I know,” I balked, horrified at what he was suggesting. That he could somehow read how much I wanted him. “Do you?” he stepped forward. I nodded firmly, though I wasn't sure my body was getting the message because I had the urge to wrap myself around him and kiss him goodbye. It was absolutely crazy. But him running off after a Nymph made me dread the idea that he wouldn't come back. “Then stop looking at me like that.” Embarrassment poured through me like a tsunami, but I fought it away, elbowing aside my shame. Because how dare he accuse me of being inappropriate? He'd had this hands all over me the other day and he'd shouted at me for that too. I was so done with his bullshit. So I stepped forward, looking him square in the eye as my hands began to shake. “Then stop looking back, Lance.” I left him with a gobsmacked expression on his face as I turned away, casting air at the symbol above the door. It unlocked with a loud clunk and I darted inside, slamming it behind me without a single glance back.(Darcy)

Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail—the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead. Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I ask you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets, where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house—the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend’s family apartment—came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds? About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd’s; we knew one another’s every physical attribute—who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family’s different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem. And, of course, there was the mandatory turbulence born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of disgrace. With only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate it—and in an era when chastity was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the young like freedom and democracy. It’s astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946. What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. That the results are in for the class of January 1950—the unanswerable questions answered, the future revealed—is that not astonishing? To have lived—and in this country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.

This is just a discussion section, which means that people—freshmen people, to be exact—spend time expounding on their theory of the world. Since almost none of them have any experience to speak of, the discussions tend to be both heated and naïve. I’m not a big talker, so I normally don’t say anything unless I’m prodded.

Entering College was probably the scariest and exciting things I have experienced in my life.

By Christmas, like most freshmen, he was done with religion, and he mooched around campus with a copy of The Stranger under his arm, hoping to impress women with long dark hair and mysteries that needed to be solved.

As most college freshmen are, I was randomly assigned a roommate by an old computer with a terrible sense of irony and humor.

Chicago told its 2016 intake of students point-blank not to expect any trigger warnings or safe spaces at their educational establishment. “Fostering a free exchange of ideas reinforces a related University priority—building a campus that welcomes people of all backgrounds,” wrote the Dean of Students, Jay Ellison, in a letter to freshmen. “Diversity of opinion and background is a fundamental strength of our community. The members of our community must have the freedom to espouse and explore a wide range of ideas.” The

Dee penned my name into the lyrics of her first single, “Open Road Summer.” She wrote it when we were freshmen, daydreaming about our summers once we turned sixteen.

As those Georgetown scholars say in their 2013 “Separate and Unequal” report, between 1995 and 2009, new freshmen enrollments grew by 197 percent for Hispanic students and 73 percent for African American students, far outpacing the 15-percent increase in white students. But where those students went to college differed greatly by ethnicity. Most of the white students went to one of the nation’s 468 more-selective public and private four-year colleges, while most of the Hispanic and African American students ended up at open-access two-year and four-year institutions.

Among the thirty-four member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, or OECD, the United States still ranks a respectable eighth in its college-enrollment rate. But in college completion—the percentage of entering college freshmen who go on to graduate—the United States ranks second to last, ahead of only Italy.

A group of researchers asked ninety-nine college freshmen and sophomores to think back a few years and recall the grades they had received for high school classes in math, science, history, foreign language study, and English.44 The students had no incentive to lie because they were told that their recollections would be checked against their high school registrars’ records, and indeed all signed forms giving their permission. Altogether, the researchers checked on the students’ memories of 3,220 grades. A funny thing happened. You’d think that the handful of years that had passed would have had a big effect on the students’ grade recall, but they didn’t. The intervening years didn’t seem to affect the students’ memories very much at all—they remembered their grades from their freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years all with the same accuracy, about 70 percent. And yet there were memory holes. What made the students forget? It was not the haze of years but the haze of poor performance: their accuracy of recall declined steadily from 89 percent for A’s to 64 percent for B’s, 51 percent for C’s, and 29 percent for D’s. So if you are ever depressed over being given a bad evaluation, cheer up. Chances are, if you just wait long enough, it’ll improve.

Leaves and Angels" True fact (as my freshmen used to write): In Florence, Italy, there’s a wing of a psychiatric hospital specializing in patients who suffer from over-exposure to great art. Patients are observed experiencing delusions, free-floating anxiety, paranoia, even depression. Why? If poetry makes nothing happen, as W.H. Auden famously wrote, shouldn’t the same be true of art? Stand in front of Michelangelo’s David; what do you see? An impossibly outsized right hand, all the more beautiful for being so; and a face reminding one of Lord Byron (or is that the Apollo Belvedere?): a warp and woof between real and ideal. As for crass indifference—shouldn’t that, too, be a ticket of admission to the Florence nuthouse? Last night, a dream-voice whispered a bittersweet nothing in my ear: If you say to someone breathlessly, “I saw an angel fall in the street today!” they look at you askance. If you say to someone breathlessly, “I saw a leaf fall in the street today!” they look at you askance.               shimmering ponds of dream—                             wearying                                   of my reflection Steven Carter, A Hundred Gourds 2:2

In 1943, incoming college freshmen—only 6 percent of whom could list the original thirteen colonies—named Abraham Lincoln as the first president and the one who “emaciated [sic] the slaves.” The

During the first day of orientation, an instructor from the general studies department asked a group of freshmen and transfer students if any of us had read and liked Jane Austen. I raised my hand eagerly, and said in my still somewhat broken English that I found her characters—created two centuries earlier—to be instantly relatable. “Wrong,” the instructor said. “Those books promote female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy.

Yes Alpha!” the freshmen called

In Middletown, 20 percent of the public high school’s entering freshmen won’t make it to graduation. Most won’t graduate from college. Virtually no one will go to college out of state.

BECAUSE OF THE WISDOM and encouragement of good parents, I decided to attend the United States Air Force Academy following high school. I got in because I was good at basketball, not because I had ever been a serious student. Life at the Academy was difficult but rewarding. The first two years were particularly taxing, especially for those like me who had just left home for the first time in their lives. When my incoming class of freshmen and I first arrived, we had everything stripped from us—civilian clothes, cars, cell phones, other personal belongings, and even our hair. Thus began my initiation into a respectable tradition, one for which I have been profoundly grateful. That tradition taught us not to lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does. It was a tradition of patriotism. The Academy was a place where I learned that no honor was granted short of hard work and merit. There, I learned

One study, for example, conveyed information about injunctive norms by associating drinking with an unpopular group, thereby implying that only “uncool” people like to drink a lot. Researchers at Stanford University figured that many students beginning their first year would not want to be associated with older, geeky grad students who spend all their time in the library. At the beginning of the academic year, the researchers posted flyers in a freshman dorm that showed a graduate student holding an alcoholic drink. “Lots of graduate students at Stanford drink and lots of them are sketchy,” the flyer said. “So think when you drink… Nobody wants to be mistaken for this guy.” In another freshman dorm, the researchers posted flyers that portrayed the negative health effects of drinking alcohol but made no mention of graduate students. Then, two weeks later, the students in both dorms completed a survey on which they reported how many alcoholic drinks they had had in the previous week. They also indicated how much they would want other people to think that they were like graduate students. It turned out that the “geeky graduate student” flyer had a dramatic effect on the drinking of students who did not want to be associated with graduate students. Among this group of freshmen, those in the “geeky” flyer condition had only had two drinks the previous week, whereas those in the health flyer condition had six drinks the previous week. (The flyers didn’t have any effect on freshmen who admired grad students; interestingly, they didn’t drink much to begin with.) Young people have a keen eye for what their peers approve of, and associating drinking with a geeky, disapproved-of group proved to be a powerful deterrent.

Wooden the preparation freak tracked drills timed almost to the second on the logged file cards. While the varsity worked behind a partition on one end of the gym, rarely seeing the seven-foot phenom or his teammates, the freshmen learned the crisp routine. Two minutes of layups, two minutes of reverse layups from both sides,

Freshmen now say the number one reason to attend college is to “get a better job,” according to a major annual survey of incoming students. Before 2006, students told researchers that the number one reason was to “learn about things that interest me.

In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” 37 percent to be “very well-off financially” (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively.

Tree was lonesome, and the adjustment to campus life was not proving to be an easy one for her. She missed the intimacy of her neighborhood back in Columbia, where she knew everyone she passed on the street. She had the typical freshman sensation of being overwhelmed. The lectures were hard to follow, a lot of the terms and subjects were new to her, and she struggled to take notes at the collegiate pace. She tried to keep up as best she could, but it seemed like she was always behind. She studied for two weeks for her first biology test. She was afraid of failing. Semeka Randall, in the next bed, heard Tree weeping. Semeka slid out of bed and padded back to Tamika and Ace’s room—she was about to cry herself. She said, “Tree’s crying and it’s her birthday. We have to do something.” The three of them spent all afternoon planning a surprise. They bought a vanilla cake with white icing; they blew up eighteen balloons and decorated the back bedroom with them; they strung crepe paper, and ordered pizzas. Word got back to me that Tree was having a hard day. In the afternoon, I called the freshmen suite. I sang “Happy Birthday” to Tree, in my voice that was hoarse from yelling at her. That cheered her up some. That evening, Ace, Semeka, and Tamika acted like it was just another night in their dorm room. They talked about going out, and decided against it. Semeka said, “Let’s just eat pizzas.” Tree thought, “There goes my birthday.” When the pizza arrived, Tamika told Tree to stay in the front room. After a minute, they called Tree into the back. She walked into a room darkened except for a flaming birthday cake. It was the final icebreaker. Tree beamed. The three freshmen circled Tree, and began to sing. Semeka started first. But she didn’t sing “Happy Birthday.” She sang their favorite song from the film Waiting to Exhale. As Semeka sang a verse, the others joined in. “Count on Me,” they sang. Tree, touched, started crying again.

Between 50 and 75% of entering freshmen at large Catholic universities typically identify themselves as believing and practicing Catholics. Only 25-50% of graduating seniors do the same.

Walking to Cooper, I asked, “Are you taking me home now?” Cooper took the beer from my hand. “There’s pizza in the kitchen. Are you hungry?” “I’d like to go home.” “Maybe your boyfriend can take you,” he said, glaring at Nick who ignored him. “Is that your way of saying you won’t take me?” Cooper finally pulled his gaze away from Nick and focused it on me. “Who gave you this drink?” “I don’t know. Some guy.” “Your boyfriend?” “No, some guy.” “Did you drink it?” “I’m eighteen and it’s illegal for me to drink alcohol.” Cooper laughed. “You’re kidding, right?” “No,” I said, crossing my arms. “I take the law very seriously.” “Nerd.” Laughing, I tightened my arms and studied him. “Did someone mess with the drink? Like a roofie?” “Maybe. These guys are idiots. Always fucking with stupid freshmen girls because you bitches don’t know any better,” Cooper said, his gaze locking onto someone behind me. I turned to find the guy who handed me the beer now standing near the door with his friends. “Should I drink this shit?” Cooper hollered at the guy. “Huh, asshole? What happens if I drink it?” When Cooper lifted the beer to his lips, the guy looked ready to run. Only a second passed before the beer went flying and smashed against the guy’s head.

Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats.

We were broken down into groups of six—mine featured three incoming freshmen and three upperclassmen who had just moved to town. “One

You’re teaching nursing?” he asked, surprised. She nodded. “I’ve been doing that for the past year or so. Turns out I like it.” “My new sister-in-law, Shelby—she’s a student there, in nursing. Cutest thing you’ll ever see. Best thing that ever happened to Luke. Any chance you know her?” “What year is she in?” Franci asked. “First year. She got married in her first semester because Paddy and Colin were done with their deployments—she waited for all the Riordans to be available. She’s way younger than Luke and is just starting college.” Franci tilted her head and smiled, thinking how sweet it was that cranky, womanizing old Luke ended up with a sweet young girl who was determined to get an education. “I’m pretty sure I haven’t met Luke’s wife. Most of the freshmen are stuck in liberal-arts courses the first year. I teach one medical-surgical course and one that boils down to charting ER patients. I’m just one of many instructors. Mostly, I teach juniors and seniors. I share an office on campus with another nursing instructor and I only teach a couple of days a week. Except for meetings, of which there are too many.” “You never did go for the meetings,” he said with a smile. “I’ll have to tell Shelby to introduce herself. You’ll love her. You’ll—” “One thing at a time, all right?” Franci asked patiently.

How did I feel when I entered Daltonbury Hall? I was excited, elated and filled with anticipation to be in England. This was a country wherein I had wanted to be located since I was six years of age. As a teenager, I was fearless and dying to explore new, uncharted territories. Daltonbury Hall was precisely the relief I craved after my Methodist Boys’ School bullying experiences. To have a handsome, caring ‘big brother’ twenty-four seven as my guardian was a dream come true for this gay boy. Was my life in Malaya very different from England? Very much so! To me, England was a completely different planet. I felt as if I had landed on the Moon. Instead of a planet filled with ugly rocks, it was a planet filled with good-looking boys (especially those I came in contact with as I was secretly groomed to enter E.R.O.S.). The boys I befriended were well-mannered and aristocratic in more ways than just being born into wealthy homes. E.R.O.S. selected candidates that had a certain je ne sais quoi about them. That made a big difference to me; they weren’t like the ‘regular’ boys I encountered at the Methodist Boys School in Malaysia. You asked how I coped when I first arrived in the United Kingdom. I was homesick for the first few weeks but I adjusted to my new environment quickly. Daltonbury Hall provided me with a fresh start, a new life. A life I was happy to leave behind when I left Kuala Lumpur. Everything was exciting, even at times when I was uncertain about my capabilities in my studies. The ‘big brothers’ were always available to assist, to comfort and encourage the freshmen and juniors when we faced difficulties in our educational and private lives. In my opinion, the BB and BS program should be installed in regular schools. I believe this will eliminate the current dysfunctional school system and reduce school bullying as well as suicidal behavior in students. More often than not, adolescent boys look to an older and more experienced guardian for guidance and mentorship. I blossomed under Nikee, Andy, and Oscar’s tutelage.

The American presidential election is a drawn-out, byzantine process that involves precinct meetings, regional caucuses, state primaries and national conventions, all to give citizens the impression that their participation matters, for in the end, the lying buffoon who gets to stride into the White House has long been vetted and preselected by the banks, death merchants and brainwashing media that run our infernally corrupt and murderous country. It's foolish to expect a system to allow anyone who threatens it to the least degree to rise to the very top, for all those who benefit from this system will do all they can to snuff out such a pest each step of the way. He'd be lucky to get a job teaching freshmen English at the community college, and is as out of place in this bloody scheme as an Iowa beaver trapper at a Hamptons pool party. As for dissidents who get print space or airtime, they are but harmless, distracting foils or court jesters. Since voting cannot change the system but legitimizes it, voters become collaborators in all of the system's crimes, as well as their own destruction, for the system works against nearly all of them.

In our hunger for guidance, we were ordinary. The American Freshman Survey, which has followed students since 1966, proves the point. One prompt in the questionnaire asks entering freshmen about “objectives considered to be essential or very important.” In 1967, 86 percent of respondents checked “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” more than double the number who said “being very well off financially.” Naturally, students looked to professors for moral and worldly understanding. Since then, though, finding meaning and making money have traded places. The first has plummeted to 45 percent; the second has soared to 82 percent.

I’ve worked with freshmen that were easier than this.

Freshmen spend in unfathomable sitting on their beds – heads against the wall or propped pillows, semistudying or not, listening to music, catching a little TV, sending e-mail messages while flipping through yesterday's student newspaper and talking about "you know, nothing," which means everything. Just plain being is pretty darn interesting in those first few months of stay-up-as-late-as-you-want independence.

They’re perceived to be more friendly, warmer, and even more physically attractive. A study showed that students who were happy as college freshmen were earning more money in their midthirties—without any wealth advantage to start. Being happy can make a big difference in your work life.

When I went to the well of the Senate to record my vote before the clerk, it drew gasps. At least that’s how it felt. It was viewed as somehow impertinent for a freshman senator to dare vote no for such a nomination, especially against an icon of the institution and especially after nearly every other Republican in the Senate, moderate or conservative, had indicated the proper vote I was supposed to make. This was an early sign of many senators’ view—that freshmen are supposed to meekly go along with prevailing sentiments. It was markedly different from my view of the office, which is that I had a responsibility to 26 million Texans to do my very best to represent them and to stand for the principles they sent me to Washington to defend.