I bet that even as I sit here writing this, there are bewildered freshmen, freshpersons, freshcreatures, and other innocent castaways from kindergarten, wandering the campus and sucking their thumbs in bewildered desperation.
The buildings sprawl in an evil labyrinth, effortlessly twisting space-time to ensure that every time you go to a calculus class, you end up at the campus police, every time you go to the store, you return to find that someone moved your dorm, and whenever you need to talk with your study group, you mysteriously end up at a kegger.
Incomprehensible people run around, talking in three-letter-acronyms - IQP! DNA! SFS! - that apparently mean something to their seething, overheated little minds. They ignore such essential parts of life as the 4-hour daily e-mail check, and actually use the Internet to look at research papers!!! They can't wait to sit down after a hard day of running around in circles calling out letters like escaped mental patients convinced that they must get onto "Wheel of Fortune" to find the Meaning of Life - to sit down in the lounge with others like themselves and begin a spirited discussion of the more thrilling aspects of organic chemical kinetics! Apparently deriving Shroedinger equations for hypothetical undiscovered atoms is a decadent pleasure they only reserve for vacations!
What's more, when they talk to you, they all assume that just like them, you are about to perish for lack of three letter acronyms in your WPI experience! After all, why else are you here at WPI if you can talk human language? Isn't conversation so much c-o-o-l-e-r when you have to play an exiting guessing game every time you encounter an open mouth, instead of hearing all those words that you already know anyway?
At last, your metabolism readjusts itself according to the College Laws of Nutrition, and you are shocked to discover yourself subsisting on a chemically inexplicable mixture of Coke, Cheeze Doodles, and those new Doritos that seem to glow with radioactive colors. This is a signal for the conniving vending machine gremlins to set all vending machines in the Galaxy to "sold out," so that you are either discovered in the middle of the night desperately assaulting the door of a closed laundromat with a vending machine beckoning inside like a seductive siren - or shamble helplessly through the cafeteria line, slowly withering away because none of food in the cafeteria line tastes like Cheeze Doodles.
Then you desperately beseech the heavens for an answer as to when does any homework ever get done here, anyway. The teachers just don't seem bright enough to realize that your schedule is already full! In the morning you run around searching for the mysterious migrating chemistry lab, in the evenings, you and the rest of the student body apply your collective physics knowledge to making sure the goddam volleyball net in the Quad stays up long enough for a ball to smack into it (Never have the words: "I can't get it up!" sounded more dire).
As it gets closer to nighttime, you have to balance sitting in the lounge with others of your ilk so you could practice being fascinating by saying totally random things, and going down to hear the new lecturer in Alden Memorial, who is either talking about sexual problems, sexual harassment, or web page design, but in either case, it's the social event tonight, so you can't miss it. Of course in the afternoons you have to do some d-e-d-i-c-a-t-e-d napping to gather the strength for all these vital efforts. Besides, you just know that at night, you'll be way too busy stalking vending machines for a Coke fix and then you'll be too wired, and besides you must check all the net chatrooms to in existence to make sure you aren't missing out on any vital parts of college experience like bloodshot eyes and Web hangover in the morning!
But your teachers understand none of it! They persist in writing on the board and assigning homework under the delusion that you can somehow be awake after such a busy night! What, do they expect you to have time to study? You're a college student, dammit!
Sometimes I wonder - what do our parents pay our tuition for?
Well, from the empyrean Olympus of my incipient weekend euphoria I, Alex Naiman, the greatest researcher into the weirdo lifestyle that ever fell from some strange planet down on a college campus, will give you folks some tips for surviving the college experience. Since you've arrived to WPI, you might as well come to terms with mutating into the perfect example of a total, unmitigated weirdo, and with 21 years of experience in being weird, I can be your hypnotic guide into the Circles of Bizzarrodom.
Well, I can give you some tips as soon as I figure out where those events are going on tonight. I'm not sure where or what they are, but if I don't go, I might miss some vital part of college life that everyone else will experience before me! Then I'd have to sit here in my room and maybe end up doing homework or some other such unnatural activity! Since, according to my calculations, the homework of WPI students is usually done by elves while the students themselves are being sucked into the cyber-depths of their chatrooms, doing my homework myself might upset some great natural balance of things, and offend the elves into not doing that anymore! I cannot offend those wonderful benevolent elves! So pardon me folks, I'll get to you by next issue! I gotta run and find out what random campus event I signed up for tonight!