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Because this is the Welcome Back edition — and I’m sure many of you freshmen and returning students will be getting loads of advice from parents and friends — I decided to give you all advice from a stranger, a stranger who will have taken seven years to get off his ass and earn a degree.
Here are a few items that you all “might” want to write down and put in your wallet, between the picture of your soon-to-be-former-high-school girlfriend and soon-to-be-maxed credit card.
1. Everyone loves to bitch about parking here. You might not go through a day where another student doesn’t decide to break the ice with you by talking about her parking ticket or his distant parking spot.
It makes me physically ill to hear it, and I usually just act like I’m sick and double over in pain to make them look around and walk away. There’s your first piece of advice: Forget the parking issues and learn to deal with the morons who feel it’s still a fresh topic to talk about. Where is good parking? I don’t know.
I just know it might be a bad idea to park in front of the federal court buildings downtown when the judges get off work.
2. (a) Go Gamecocks! I’m from the North, but my blood will always run garnet. More advice would be to attend every sporting event you can. If that means you sell your microfridge to make it to Knoxville this year, so be it.
Football is back, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll be at all of the home games.
2. (b) Here’s more advice: never settle for the coach’s poll. It’s a pathetic ranking system that is handed off from head coaches to the assistants.
Whoever ranked USC at No. 21 should be running the same drills that have been killing players. They need to be drilled. USC, pre-ranked at No. 21, is a travesty. You can change that by pushing our players and coaches to higher standards.
Tailgate, pound beer, pee in the open and remember that only you can help Williams-Brice Stadium become the 12th man.
3. If you’re like me and you need coffee to start each and every day, stay away from the campus Starbucks.
It’s awful. You put coffee brewing into the hands of sweet tea drinkers, and it’s going to suck. The best coffee is right next door at the GMP.
It’s a simple blend constituting Columbia tap and generic grounds. But boy, is it good.
4. Get your parents to buy you a computer. Plead with them.
If you think the University of South Carolina is going to let you use their general library facilities past midnight, you’re dead wrong. If you can muster a new computer from the parents, you can at least research online past midnight.
Many of big, state universities have numerous libraries that are open 24 hours most days. “Yeah, OK,” the USC library stays open until 2 a.m. during exam weeks, but isn’t that the end of the semester?
I seem to remember most of my professors only weighing the final grade from15 to 30 percent. What about the rest of the semester when I need the library to exploit the other 85 to 70 percent of my grade?
5. This isn’t as much advice as it is a scenario. It’s a Thursday night. You have an exam the next day at 12:50 p.m. in Sociology. Do you stay at home and study to make the grade, or do you hang up the books and funnel beer?
I would say this: When you go to your buddies on Monday and start bitching about the returned grade of “F,” don’t ever think they’re calling their friends telling them all about your misfortune.
Don’t ever think they stay awake at night like you and hope you can pull off the next exam. They’re not.
Your friends will never, and I mean never, worry about your grade. It goes in one ear and out the other.
So why don’t you all realize this and do what you have to do? I’m not saying don’t funnel beer. Hell, I’ll be the first to hold the Home Depot project high, but I’ll be the last of everyone to listen to you bitch about your irresponsibility and your bad decisions. I got my own binging vs. B-average battle.
Remember, nobody at school cares whether you fail.
If you think crying to your friends about an exam that “did you wrong” is good talk, you will fall into the same category as the parking conversationalists.
I will pretending to puke on your shoes.
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