I think one of the first pieces of advice people gave me about college, after “do what you enjoy,” and “get enough sleep,” was “GET ALL THE FREE THINGS.”
Since I was quite ignorant about how college worked at the time, and since we live in quite the capitalistic society, I didn’t understand this. I didn’t see any situation in which Brown would just give things away. But then college came, and I discovered a new part of myself that I never have known before.
I’m a beast at collecting free t-shirts.
What perhaps is genuinely disturbing about this is the lengths I will go to expand my collection. I have a schedule saved to my computer which includes the dates and times of all opportunities to get free shirts. I carefully comb through the Brown Morning Mail, hunting for more chances. It’s an obsession, the sort of which I haven’t had since my third grade hunt to complete my collection of state quarters (dammit, Nevada, why must you elude me?).
I have a special shelf in my closet filled with the t-shirts I have successfully scavenged over the past few months. It’s the sort of thing I can proudly display to visitors or party guests, my arm like a TV game show host introducing prizes. Or hang them up on my walls like a redneck trophy hunter might his stuffed deer heads.
If I’m old and drunk enough (read as: when I’m a senior), I can tenderly unfold them, and reminisce about each one’s individual story. The one I sprinted across campus at 7am for, so I’d nab it before they ran out. Or the one I grabbed by volunteering at a conference I knew nothing about. It’ll be like a photo album.
Except, you know, you can wear this photo album.
Double the points.
And now that freshman year is wrapping up—which I’m still in shock about, by the way—I think that this might be the thing I take away from it most. It’s not every day that you scramble from the library to the basketball stadium in the middle of a study sesh to bag a free t-shirt before they run out. And it’s certainly not everyday that you pretend to be an old, graduating senior in order to bump up your chance of getting a one of those elusive upperclassmen-priority t-shirts.
The knowledge, the novelty, the campus were all incredible parts of my freshman year. But there’ll always be that space in my memories for my endless quest for free t-shirts.
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