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Identity

The Broadly Guide to College

A practical guide to surviving the awkwardest four years of your life.
Text by Callie Beusman and Mitchell Sunderland. Photo by Kat Aileen.

Academics

You're presumably at college for this reason, but the truth is you're paying $50,000 a year to play beer pong and argue with people about books none of you have finished because your constant beer-guzzling has diminished your critical faculties.

Bob Marley

It's a miracle if you get through college without fucking at least one guy with a Bob Marley poster hanging above his bed.

Campus Cops

Bald men with small dicks who enjoy breaking up dorm parties and confiscating students' bongs.

Dorm Rooms

What costs $3,000 a month and comes with a communal bathrooms, asbestos, and sinks clogged with boys' facial stubble? Your dorm room!

Experimenting

Do you want to dye your hair pink? Do you suffer from a cocaine addiction? Do you want to make out with members of the same sex, but only for four years? It's OK. Just tell everyone you're experimenting.

Frat parties

The petri dish in which rape culture is incubated.

Gonorrhea

Mono is to high school what gonorrhea is to college.

Halloween

An annual nightmare for local hospitals, in which understaffed nurses must treat coeds dressed as slutty cats for alcohol poisoning.

Indie music

College students love to pretend that they appreciate various genres of maudlin wailing obscured by artful layers of distortion.

James Joyce

"I love Ulysses" — all these liars in your Intro to English Lit class.

Kurt Cobain

We get it, guys, you love Nirvana, but that doesn't mean you look cute in that flannel shirt.

Liberal Arts

Liberal arts colleges (aka some of America's most expensive schools) mostly exist to teach you that everything is a social construct.

Marx

You probably won't actually read him at college, but you'll sure as fuck act like you have.

Nietzsche

You probably won't actually read him at college, but you'll sure as fuck act like you have.

Orgies

Few college students participate in group sex, but it would be cool if they did.

Pooping in public

Of all the coming-of-age experiences that occur at college, this is by far the most humbling and significant.

Questioning authority

College is about sticking it to The Man, but not so much that he gives you below an A- on your term paper.

Roommate

The stranger you'll have to spend a year masturbating next to.

Sports

They have these at college, right?

Text

In comparative literature classes with names like "Sexuality and Space: Queer Literature from James Baldwin to Kate Bornstein," there will always be one girl who shouts, "I love doing close-reading analysis of the text!!!"

Ursula

You will have at least one college professor named Ursula.

Veganism

Most college students either go through a vegan, Buddhist, or neo-nazi phase. Hopefully, you will only briefly give up meat and dairy.

Women's Studies 101

If a straight dude takes an Intro to Women's Studies course and doesn't lecture everyone about patriarchal hegemony for the next two to three months after, did he really get the credit?

Xanax

The pill you take to sleep after an Adderall-fueled study bender.

YouTube

Of the six hours you spend in the library working on your art history final, five will be devoted to watching videos of unlikely animal friendships.

Zodiac Killer

He could be your professor.