How to Have A Good Convocation as a First Year

Convocation is a huge and defining event in Smith culture. You get naked, then you get drunk, then you throw up in Seelye bathroom on your way to your first ever college class. It’s tradition. But as a first year, wet behind the ears, still trying to figure out how to make posters stay up on your slippery dorm room walls, it can be hard to have a good first convocation. Fear no more. With these ten easy steps, you not only will have a night of revelry but you might just make some friends! (Whose names you won’t remember, and you’ll be too afraid to ask.)

• Get upperclassmen to adopt you for the night and feed you alcohol. This step is simple: as you walk down the hallways of your brand new house, try to have a mix of coolness and wide-eyed nervousness. An upperclassman will surely jump from the shadows and take you under their wing. The secret is to remember that upperclassmen want to find and corrupt a first year. They want to feel like the wise old movie star, cynically smoking a cigarette and telling a young starlet the ways of the industry. (Benefits of being with an upperclassman during convocation: meeting new people, accessing alcohol, and looking far cooler than the firsties who don’t know any upperclassmen.)

• Don’t go all out on your convocation outfit. Obviously you want to look cool and sexy, but it isn’t necessary to buy a whole new wardrobe for your house’s 70s theme look. Everyone is too worried about their own convocation outfit to pay any attention to yours. Just put on a pair of platforms and a tiny little shirt and call it a day. You’re going to have three more years to go as wild as you want, but it’s best to test the waters before you go fully topless. (Unless you really want to, in which case, pasties it is.)

• Have a short prepared introduction story to tell to all the different people you’ll meet that night. After a week of orientation, you are definitely going to be sick of the slate. You will have said “Hi, my name is Emma. I use she/they pronouns. My intended major is Psychology and I’m from outside of Boston” at least a hundred times. For convocation try spicing it up. “Hi, my name is Emma, I’m from Weston. My mom hooked up with Johnny Depp in the 90s.” Throw in a spicy fun fact and people, regardless of how drunk they are, will remember you. A couple days later you may sit down to a vaguely familiar person in Intro to Psychology and she’ll say, “Oh my gosh! You’re the one whose mom slept with Johnny Depp, right?” Instant friendship.

• Pregame the convocation ceremony. The ceremony is loud, crowded, and overwhelming, and being a touch inebriated makes it significantly easier to handle. You can be sure less than half of the population will be sober for that ceremony.

• Get drunk enough where you sort of hate yourself the morning after, but not so drunk that other people hate you. If you don’t get what this means or you were a good kid in high school and didn’t drink at all, drink less than what you think you should.

• Leave the convocation ceremony early. After the screaming and singing, the ceremony gets kind of boring and the siren’s song of sitting on the floor of some random person’s dorm room getting drunk will get stronger and stronger. As people start quietly slipping away, join them! 

• Hang out with different groups of people throughout the night. If you take my first piece of advice, you’ll start off your night with a group of people who are already friends which will be fun until you start wondering if you will ever have a group of friends like that. At this point, venture out into the unknown and look for some other cool first years who are looking to create a group chat that will be active until winter break. They may not be your friends forever, but hopefully you’ll find some good eggs.

• Forget your convocation shirt somewhere because you’re too drunk to keep track of it, making it so one person ends up with four or five convocation shirts the morning after. I have no idea where my convocation shirt ended up but I can only hope that it is making a good pajama shirt for whoever I left it with that night. At the end of the day, you don’t need a shirt to barely remember the fun you had on your first real night of college.

• Don’t swim in paradise pond. It’s not worth it and it’s kind of gross. I promise you don’t want to start off your first semester of college with a staph infection. 

• Choose your drunken hookup carefully. Getting to college and hooking up with people may seem exciting, but be careful who you hitch your wagon to; the person you hook up with during your first convocation may be the person you date for uthe next four years. Choose wisely.