Featured in our latest issue, Nonsense Loves You!
By Trashman and James Sweeney
How’s it going, student h70295 -- we mean, Very Happy Hofstra Student! Remember the greatest day of your life -- that day you received your acceptance letter from Hofstra, and then kept reading to find out that you got into the prestigious Honors College?! (If this is not the greatest day of your life, you are incorrect! Yikes!) Now, this may come as a shock to some, but there are actually some people who are unsure about whether or not they should take on the overbearing workload of the Honors College Lifestyle while also pursuing a college major. That’s why we created this listicle, so that hopefully you’ll become informed enough to make the right decision: to join the utopian community known as the Celibate Thinkers Society Hofstra Honors College. The final step to entry was reading this paragraph! There’s no turning back now!
6. VANDER POEL IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN ALL THE OTHER DORMS
First off, we have perhaps the most obvious reason for making the Honors College jump -- that’s right, it’s the fact that Vander Poel is better than every other dorm on campus, and it’s really not even close! While schematically it is literally the exact same structure as Enterprise, Constitution, Estabrook, Alliance, and Bill of Rights, but with more furniture and another stove and microwave on the 13th floor, there’s way more going on here than that. The hallways are a little wider, as well! It’s pretty hard to tell at first, but if you were to, say, get a bunch of awkward kids together to play the Rick and Morty theme song on ukuleles and kazoos in front of the 7th floor elevators, you’d almost definitely be able to fit one more lanky engineering major who actually wanted to be a theater major but makes up for his stifled passion by starting a conga line of forced massages. Is that killer or what?!
5. YOU ALWAYS KNOW WHERE TO FIND ALL YOUR FRIENDS
So, you’re busy from 11:00 to 4:00 every Tuesday and Thursday and all of your non-Honors College friends want to hang out with you during that exact window of time. What’s a prodigy to do?! Well here’s a perfect solution for ya: Forget ‘em. Leave them behind. Who the hell needs them? They’re not smart enough for you. If they were, they’d be sitting next to you in your lecture courses, helping you decide whether or not it's cool to wear your lanyard. (It is.) If you want, you could just leave everything else behind too. Fully immerse yourself in the Honors College. We are your family now. This is your home. You are no longer a human being with feelings. You are a perfect, rigid, 9-digit code. We are the only proprietors of friendship you'll ever know. Frisina is your only god now.
4. SILENCE
One of the many perks of living in the glisteningly-smooth Vander Poel, with its excessively wide hallways and charming elevator operator named Martin, is that the RAs enforce silence more strictly than in any of the other buildings. If you live with a roommate, then you can most likely have a whispered conversation or two under the covers you’ll share. If you dorm alone, though, prepare to have a zipper stitched into your face. Boo-yah! Before you know it, you’ll be left with nothing to listen to than the sound of your own organs consuming one another in a race to simply not be. But what happens after your organs have been digested? You wouldn’t want to waste any of that meat of yours, would you? Of course not, so you keep a collection plate under your bed. And just before the pure black silence can completely consume you, leaving you yearning so longingly for the outside world that you claw out all external organs too -- those curse’d few still capable of sensation -- you hear the RA rapping softly on your door: he says some of your floormates are getting together to watch a little low-volume Big Bang Theory until it’s time for another weird all night study session fueled by a guilt that’s hard-to-place to say the least. And just like that, you’re reminded of why it’s all worth it!
3. PROFESSORS TALKING ABOUT SEX
Don’t you love hearing your grandfather talk about things from his adolescence he can’t have anymore, like stickball, the sexual act known as coitus, or the Brooklyn Dodgers? Just picture that, but in a lecture hall (And unlike your family, Hofstra’s handing out tenure left and right!).
2. POLITICALLY CORRECT CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY GET-TOGETHERS
If it’s not clear enough by now, the Hofstra Honors College community is the result of a lot of planning and curation on the part of the Resident Assistants, Resident Directors, and concerned parents. Infamously risque games like Cards Against Humanity -- sort of an edgier version of mad-libs, minus the creativity -- had long been banned from Hofstra residence halls, presumably because of the potential threat of poorly-adjusted kids laughing too hard at the thought of Furries Doing 9/11, or something. Leave it to that ragtag group of misfits in Vander Poel, though, to end Hofstra’s campus-wide stigma against trying too hard to be funny. The fact of the matter is, these kids couldn’t all make it on their own. And while it’s safe to assume that a lot of them would be fine just sort of hanging in the periphery of another more solidified friend group where actual personalities interact with one another, perhaps laughing at inside jokes whose genesis they weren’t present for -- isn’t it better to at least give them a chance to build something resembling a real memory with other people? And isn’t Cards Against Humanity: Greek Tragedy Pack the perfect way to get to know all the kids you’ll never really feel comfortable making eye contact with, even when you need to borrow someone's phone because you got locked outside your room in nothing but shower shoes and a towel? We think so.
Wear the lanyard.
1. BRAGGING ABOUT THE PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLARSHIP
This one actually gets old kind of fast. Look, we all got it. Rabinowitz doesn't give a Rabinoshit about your high school accolades. Hofstra doesn’t even look at your SAT scores. Just shut up. We all got it.