A lot of students don’t survive freshman year. Those that do find that sophomore year is more interesting. For most college students, not just at RPI but at almost any college, freshmen are interchangeable parts. All engineers need to take a couple of semesters of basic engineering before they can specialize. All chemists need to take basic chemistry so they can have the proper language. All liberal arts majors need to take some basic English courses, so they can learn to write. RPI was more extreme than most, but not by much.
Almost all colleges understand this, and to some degree or other try to help their students cope and adapt. They have tutors and help offices and at RPI the structured nature of freshman courses (everybody does the same classes) helps. That doesn’t affect the fact that more than a few students are simply too immature to be on their own, and will simply spend their time fucking off, like Buddy.
Sophomore year is when you start to specialize. At this point the classes become a lot smaller and more intimate. Gone are the days when 500 students crammed into Chemistry 1 classes. Now you get lectures for maybe 30 Organic Chemistry students. Different disciplines will have different requirements, so electrical engineers won’t need to take hydraulic engineering courses, and so forth. Make friends with these guys, because they’re going to be with you for the next three years!
The classes also become tougher, and it’s very easy for the professors to spot the students sleeping through class, since it won’t be in a giant lecture hall. There will be another cut on students who somehow managed to fake their way through freshman classes and now have to take it up a notch. Likewise, at this point a lot of students start moving off campus, and have to face those challenges as well. While some colleges insist that everybody live on campus, most colleges simply don’t have the dorm space to do that. At RPI fully 1 in 4 students live in frats, and just about as many live in apartments in town. The school simply does not have enough rooms for all students.
As I settled back into full time life at Kegs, I could see some of these dynamics working already. Joe and I had meshed nicely. He was a relatively quiet guy, who didn’t drink much and never even looked at drugs. He didn’t chase women around very much, and in fact kept that part of his life rather quiet. That being said, I never once had a warning bell from my gay-dar, and I suspected he had some action going back home. Home was in suburban New Jersey, a place I had once lived in for a few years and never much cottoned to. Joe had a good sense of humor, in a quirky and understated sort of fashion, and was actually a decent magician. He did a lot of card tricks, with the most awful stage manner, but you could never see how he made those cards appear or disappear! He was a hard core Catholic.
We made it through September fine, and then I did that first weekend at Marilyn’s the first weekend of October. She visited two weekends later, and as I promised Joe, he had plenty of advance warning. We were already working on a calendar — I would visit Marilyn the beginning of November, she would visit a week or two later, I would visit her for Thanksgiving, and that would be it. December we would go bonkers for finals, and then we would have the winter break. We’d worry about the 1975 schedule then. I wanted to keep things under control this time around, and be a better roommate. Joe was a decent guy, and I always felt guilty about being an asshole with him. I knew he didn’t like my being a doper and one time Marilyn and I went to bed while he was still in the sack himself, and that really offended him.
I could already see what was happening with some of my incoming brothers. Andy Kowalchuk was a big time pot smoker, which I knew now but not on the first trip through. He got me into pot big time back then, but I kept it much more low key now. Still, he got Bill Keswick, a chemistry major, to design a hash oil still and steal some lab gear to run it. This turned out to be an amusing weekend project for the two of them. Jerry Modanowicz was proving to be an asshole, but since he had moved into the glorified closet that was one end of the Underground Railroad, he didn’t have any roommates to worry about. The Cisco Kid was back, uglier and stupider than ever, having barely managed to keep his grades high enough to come back. Within two weeks he had already broken one chair when he sat in it, and I knew it was the first of many to come.
Joe was a math major, and was taking sophomore level math classes, but he didn’t need all that much help from me, and rarely asked. He thought my working on a doctorate was a little strange, but it wasn’t that odd. In fact, despite being a real animal house and a nest of dopers and drunks, Kegs had a surprising number of geniuses living there. A lot of the upperclassmen were in five year engineering masters programs. Both Pabst and Schlitz, the Beer Buddies, would graduate with electrical engineering degrees (pure math) in three years, and Homer Simpson would get out in four years with a masters in computer science. Joe would graduate in four years with two bachelors degrees, math and economics, and then defer his military duty while he went to Wharton on his own dime and get both an MBA and a masters in operations research (also pure math) in two years. My doing a doctorate in four years was not at all out of the question.
Marilyn showed up two weeks later in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, while Bradley was taking a rare late afternoon Friday class. We quickly tore upstairs and snuck in a quickie before he got back, although we giggled a lot when he came back from class and found us sitting there pretending to study. Marilyn had already met Joe before (he was my second in the duel with Ghormley) as well as the rest of the brothers, and settled right in. There were always a few girlfriends around the house, some serious and some not. We did not live a chaste lifestyle. It was rather more of a desperately horny lifestyle!
The best example of this was a fellow about five years ahead of us who made a name for himself and the fraternity at every college campus in the area. He combined the finest traits of nerdly math wizardry and terminal horniness. He figured that an average brother would meet, over the course of a semester, ten to twenty girls at various parties. They would end up getting one or two of them in the sack, a closing ratio of roughly 10 %. So therefore, apply some good old fashioned Yankee ingenuity to the problem. He would hit on 100 to 200 girls a semester! If it had two X chromosomes, he would buy her a drink at a party, quite bluntly say that he was only interested in one thing, and ask if she was interested in it also. If so, they could leave together. On the down side, he got his face slapped a whole shitload of times, had drinks dumped on his head even more, and earned a major reputation as a first grade creep. On the plus side, he figured his ratio held true, and he got laid a lot! It took us years to live his reputation down!
By strange happenstance, we were having a party Saturday night, the first big one of the semester. It wasn’t Halloween, which was the following week, but we were celebrating Oktoberfest, so we had a couple of kegs going. Next weekend we’d get even sillier. That afternoon, Marty and I and Marilyn set up the bars, much like I had done with Marty last year when I met Marilyn. It was looking like I was a junior member of the Social Committee, or maybe they had just figured out I was a lush. Joe was spending the night in the triple with Bruno and Lynchburg, and with any luck, Marilyn and I could spend some quality time alone before the party that afternoon.
We had finished setting up the bars and were relaxing in the living room when another couple of guys, juniors, came in and plopped down on the couch. They were starting to argue about learning and education, which Marilyn found amusing, since she was an education major. Meanwhile, they got totally off the first topic and started arguing about what the most important thing they learned in high school was. That was when I chimed in. “Hey, I learned everything I ever needed to know back when I was five years old. Everything else is just BS.”