Each year, after receiving their acceptance letters and sending in their tuition deposits, most of the new crop of pre-freshmen take what must seem like a big step toward becoming part of the Georgetown community: joining the Class of [fill in year here] Facebook group. This group facilitates Facebook stalking at its finest: it’s full of hundreds of complete strangers, all of whom have the potential to be a roommate, classmate, or new best friend. And before ever meeting them, Facebook allows soon-to-be freshmen to imagine exactly where all these strangers might figure into their next four years at Georgetown.
Going through the profiles of 1,500 new people, however, is a daunting task for even the most seasoned Facebook stalkers. Year after year, though, pre-frosh begin their college-level social networking with furious aplomb, sending out friend requests to scores of other incoming freshmen and posting repeatedly in the group’s discussion topics.
Sending out uninvited friend requests can seem like a great way to get a head start on a few friendships. Noticing that someone else “likes” both the Kings of Leon and Family Guy on Facebook can make the eventual development of a lifelong, unbreakable friendship seem inevitable, even if neither party has a clue who the other is.
The group’s online discussion boards, on the other hand, usually allow for a little more actual communication. Whether the topic is partying, summer reading assignments, or D.C. concerts, these topics become the place where extra-chummy pre-frosh really start to stand apart from the crowd and become more than just a profile with a picture, posting epically under-informed missives on their expectations for the upcoming four years.
Inevitably, there are those students who get so caught up in the excitement of it all, registering hundreds of comments and random friend requests, that by the time they arrive on campus for New Student Orientation, the majority of the incoming freshman class already know who they are. These are the pre-frosh celebrities.
These people are by no means fame-mongers, but they are nonetheless among the most visible figures on campus to their classmates. Their fame is accidental, an unintended consequence of their over-aggressive online amicableness, but that doesn’t stop them from being recognized everywhere. When Facebook celebrities stop being just a profile picture and a name and become real people going to class, eating in Leo’s, or studying in Lauinger, many probably find that living in semi-stardom can be difficult.
An initial meeting with a pre-frosh celeb can be as uncomfortable for the celebrity as it is for the common freshman. For both parties, meeting someone in the flesh whom each has only ever known through the Internet can be kind of awkward, to say the least. Both are faced with the dilemma of whether they should acknowledge that they oddly know a lot about a person that they are now meeting for the first time, or try to start over as if they had no idea who the other person was until this very moment. And for those stars who are famous for volunteering their mom to buy alcohol the first night or for trying to find out where to get fake I.D.s, they must learn to accept that their start at college will be no tabula rasa.
Luckily, for most pre-frosh celebrities, life in the limelight doesn’t last forever. Many of them will try to shy away from their fame by de-friending people they didn’t actually meet in the first few months of college, or deleting posts from the Facebook group. Slowly, everyone starts to realize that real friendships can’t be formed online, and even the celebrities revert back to the more traditional ways of meeting new people. And soon enough, the stars become just one of many new names and faces around Georgetown’s campus, when they hopefully can become known for more than just their early overeager online friendliness.
Find out if Kelsey’s achieved online fame at kmcculough@georgetownvoice.com
