Freshman year is a whirlwind of adjustment, excitement, and a complete flooding by new things—Clubs! Classes! Sports! Unit wars! The Ratty! Gail! Your first Jose card swipe! The souped-up Ben & Jerry’s machine! Spicy-withs! Your first gender-neutral shower experience! Pretending every weekend that this is the weekend you’re going to Boston! Being convinced you’re going to double concentrate!—Etc., etc. You’re consistently so overwhelmed that you don’t even have time to think, let alone to be sad. Upon your first day on campus sophomore year, however, everything changes. A dark, depressing, haunting spirit swarms through the sophomore dorms, infiltrating the minds and souls of all sophomores: The Sophomore Slump.
Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with this beast, and in that case, lucky you! It convinces you that your prior actions have all been faulty, leading you on a dead-end path to nowhere. You are directionless, lost, and incapable of getting yourself going again.
Your chosen concentration? Wrong! Horrible! Entirely incompatible with you.
Your future career prospects? Dim! Bleak! Nobody will want to hire you—especially with that horrible major!
Your love life? Poor! Non-existent! Nobody wants to date someone who looks like a raccoon all the time.
Your friends? Boring! Awful! They hate you obviously!
The Sophomore Slump will scream these lines unnervingly into sophomores’ ears. Beyond being a reliably irritating and obnoxiously loud voice in your head, this evil being manifests itself in numerous other ways. It generally forces out tears about once a week, and for some, far more than that. Sometimes these tears are the cute ‘aww a tear drop is falling down my cheek’ type of tears, but more often, these are snotty, red-face, swollen eyes type tears. As mentioned above, the Sophomore Slump leaves you looking like a raccoon all of the time. The sad being in a 4th floor cubicle at the library with their head tunneled into a sweatshirt, as sobs ripple through their body, is just another victim of the all-too-common Sophomore Slump. The human frantically scrolling through the courses listed on CAB (Courses At Brown for those not hip to the Brunonian lingo), convinced their current selections are insufficient, is also a poor victim. The person who has single-handedly put forth 95% of the traffic on Brown’s website Focal Point, which lists and details all of the overwhelming number of concentrations (82 + the infinite realm that independent concentrations offer), also is a lost soul snatched by the Sophomore Slump.
I’ve heard that most people escape from this horrifying monster with a newfound lease on life, ready to dive into whatever they decide to study, and continue on to impart good on the world. Either that, or they become lost forever in the space-time vacuum of the Sophomore Slump. Hopefully my peers and I manage to get the former option, but at the very least, the ghoulish Sophomore Slump provides some great Halloween costume fodder!
Image via Ariele Ladabaum.