Senior DisOrientation struck on Saturday night, snakes and all, and I wasn’t happy.
Not just because I’m a sophomore, but because my November birthday guarantees that two years from now I’ll be poring over psych textbooks in a lonely living room somewhere, yellow-braceleted into second-class status while all of my friends are out getting trashed at a University-sanctioned party.
It’s not like I’m some freak prodigy who skipped three grades, either; I was just unlucky enough to have my birth date fall awkwardly between the Dec. 31 cutoff in the D.C. school district and the Sept. 1 deadline favored by most private schools and many school districts nationwide.
But why should that stop me, or anyone else, from having the complete DisO experience? Shouldn’t Senior Disorientation happen next semester, after the rest of the senior class has turned 21?
Maybe not. Rocco Sica (SFS ‘07), one of the not-yet-legal seniors who attended the tent party last weekend, wasn’t too upset about the timing.
“My birthday is particularly late, so it’s not like they would hold off for me,” he said, although he did note that the week “is terribly aimed at people who are over 21.”
Of course, most non-school-sponsored social events at Georgetown are aimed at people who drink, often to excess, so an alcohol-related occasion is nothing new.
Most underage students seem to forget that drinking isn’t actually legal, after all. But when the drinks are under the administration’s control, you need to be a little more careful than just putting your cup down if you’re under 21 and a DPS officer knocks on the door.
“For an event such as the tent party, we are obligated to take precautions in dealing with [under] 21 year olds for obvious reasons, like my name personally being on the liquor license for an over 1,000 person party,” Senior Class Committee chair Frank Balsamello (COL ‘07) said.
“When we graduate, there will still be under-21-year-olds, so to wait for everyone to reach that age, we would never be able to program anything.”
The legal argument is a strong one, and I have no problem with the bracelet system, but I still think that waiting until January to hold the biggest Senior Class Committee events is a reasonable proposition.
I’ve seen a lot of yellow bracelets walking around this week, and the ones that are attached to people I know will all be gone by the end of the 2006.
Maybe the red/yellow issue is a moot point after all, though. As Sica said, “There would have been no difficulty if I wanted to drink.”
