Stephen Danley | Hallmates: Your new family

New Student Orientation is over, which means a whole new class of freshmen is about to learn that college is not only about partying - unless you're an upperclassmen crashing NSO again. Those same freshman are about to learn that their peer advisors, those beacons of maturity during orientation, will most likely show up to Thursday-morning class quite hung over from Wednesday-night sink-or-swim at Smokey Joe's.

At this point, I am sure that freshmen have been inundated with advice, both good and bad. The best piece of advice I received during NSO was to avoid the perils of "hallcest." It's actually quite a simple concept. If you hook up with someone in your hall, just remember that you will have to walk past that person's room every time you want to shower for the next eight months. That's awkward like "a-w-k-w" (really, look at it).

Here is the real point.

Some crazy stuff is going to happen during the beginning of the year. I was about three days into classes my freshman year when there was a knock at my door. I was studying (Madden audibles, that is), so my roomy, Ryan Pettinella, got the door.

"Hey Steve, it's . uh . for you."

Guy Code mandates that a male provide warning before putting a fellow male into a potentially precarious situation with a female. Ryan's voice read loud and clear: "You have girl problems, kiddo." So I came to the door prepared - or so I thought. In front of me was a girl on the verge of completely losing it. Tears everywhere, her eyes were flashing with anger. I braced for what I knew was coming.

"Steve, you're using me for my Easy Mac!"

Huh?

What's the moral of the story? Nothing, really - I always find stories with morals a little stifling. But the point is that your hallmates are going to have disproportionate control over your experience here. Not only are you going to party with them, but you are going to go to class with these same kids the next morning. And they're going to have something worthwhile to say - even if they're hung over.

That, more than anything, is the biggest change in college. It's our peers that are our immediate sounding board. For the first time, our family is no longer the day-to-day fiber of our life, and God knows my mom always made me eat salad so I would have enough fiber.

It's the most natural thing in the world to ask a kid where he's from or what school he's in. It's easier than the girl upstairs (you know the one I'm talking about) to ask someone what parties they are going to crash. But how many of us ask each other where we are going to church?

It doesn't happen often.

Unfortunately, church is much like the rest of college; the value we get out of it has a lot to do with the people we bring into it. We never head off to parties by ourselves or have meals without our hallmates, but students routinely trudge off to church by themselves - and it's because it's just not talked about. It took me three months to figure out that two kids from my hall were making the same five-block trip to my church as I was.

Is it any wonder that church is the first thing we drop from our schedules? We isolate it from the rest of our lives. So here's what I am suggesting: If you are Jewish, find someone willing to make the trip to Hillel; if you are Muslim, ask someone to attend Friday prayer upstairs in the ARCH; and if you are Catholic, feel free to join me at St. Agatha-St. James on 38th Street. We sit up front and to the left.

But find a hallmate to sit with and give it a shot. It may be the best advice you get all week.

Stephen Danley is a College senior from Germantown, Md. Late Night Conversation appears on Fridays.

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