If you're like me, you expected your sophomore summer to be the most enjoyable term of your academic career. Take a typical term, remove the stress and add tons of sunshine, trips to the river, pong, tails and formals and the glorious result is sophomore summer.
This is supposed to be "the best summer of my life," according to the gushing accounts of upperclassmen. But the stress and over-scheduling that sophomore summer was supposed to transcend have managed to take over this term as well.
We may have a lot of social events, but now everyone's social calendars have been booked to the point where socializing has become another source of stress. If I actually went to every activity my house schedules, I would get absolutely no sleep instead of very little. It appears that during 09X, many students have replaced their soul-crushingly booked academic and extra-curricular schedules with overpacked social lives.
And as much as we'd like to think summer is no time for academics, that just hasn't been the case. We still have papers, midterms, projects and due dates. Possibly the worst part about it is that professors actually expect us to be motivated enough to put in all the time and effort these assignments actually require.
Meagan Tibbo '11 said that she was "expecting a breeze" coming into summer term.
A varsity soccer player, she thought not having daily practices would free up her time for a more active social life. But with bio 45, bio 14 and French 10 on her plate (a hefty course-load for any term) and a part-time internship at DHMC, Tibbo's social life has taken a backseat to the work she needs to get done.
"If you call a social life hanging out once every two weeks, then maybe I have one," she mused.
While I'd like to be doing fun things outside all the time like I'm "supposed to," the unanticipated obstacles of daily life continually get in my way.
Sophomore summer has turned out to be just a typical term, but with exponentially higher and more unrealistic social expectations, significantly more rain, just as much studying (or rather, not studying and failing) and tons of annoying adolescents milling about and claiming the campus as their own. Why didn't the upperclassmen ever mention these all-too-common and all-too-annoying facets of sophomore summer?
At first, I figured that this summer must be an aberration compared to the previous ones that got such rave reviews. Maybe during this year and this year alone due to some unfortunate cosmic catastrophe classes got harder, the weather got worse and dozens of new camps sprung up. Why else would this summer be so different from all the ones we had heard about? The upperclassmen wouldn't flat-out lie to uswould they?
Let's be honest: The world isn't as rosy as we'd like it to be. Rain falls and sometimes it even pours (just look outside any given day of the week). Classes are just as hard as they've always been. Annoying high-schoolers exist (we used to be them, remember?). And yes, those older role models whose word you have always taken as gospel, whom you have always looked up to, who are so mature, beautiful, flawless and wise they lied to you!
I know, I know, it hurts. But don't act so surprised, because we all lie. Last weekend I overheard a group of Psi U brothers telling some '12s that pledge term was the best term of their lives.
My conversations with said Psi Us or brothers of any other house, for that matter were not so sunny when they were actually in the middle of pledge term.
In fact, I remember many a long and bitter Blitz complaining about the time that went into pledge term.
Have these boys forgotten what their pledge term was really like in their months of "bro-hood" since then? I think not. Just as frat brothers can perpetuate disgusting "pledge bonding" activities during the fall and still sleep at night, these relatively new members are able to look prospective rushees right in the eyes and tell them that those three months of hell were "the best in their lives." Hey, if they went through it, it's only fair that everyone has to.
The same logic applies to sophomore summer. If this is truly the best summer of your life, then you've probably had some pretty mediocre summers. But you'll still tell the '12s that it was amazing. After all, fair is fair.
