The first month of school is one long fever dream. You come back from summer with every intention of being a new person: more put together, more academic, more balanced. You tell yourself that this semester, you’ll keep your planner updated, drink a lot of water and maybe even start your homework before midnight. Then, the first month hits you like a bus, and suddenly you’re knee deep in missed Canvas deadlines.
It starts with the hype of move-in. You’re hugging everyone you haven’t seen since May, yelling “we HAVE to catch up!” as if you’ll actually set up a coffee date. Every night of syllabus week — oh wait, that’s right. We don’t have a syllabus week. Madison decided to skip that crucial grace period and throw us directly into assignments. While other Big Ten schools are spending seven days half drunk and pretending to read their syllabi, we’re sitting in an Ingraham lecture hall watching a professor breeze through 50 powerpoint slides as if we didn’t just spend the summer forgetting how to string together a coherent thought.
This lack of a buffer sets the tone. Enter: the infamous bar raids. Nothing sums up the first month of school better than standing in a packed bar around 11 pm when the lights suddenly turn on and the cops file in. Drinks are abandoned and everyone goes into survival mode. One second you’re taking shots with your friends, the next you’re trying to make your way to a “hidden” corner of the bathroom that may or may not even exist. You swear it’s the last time you’ll go out until you’re 21, but by the next night, you’re back in line, praying your ID holds up and acting like the whole thing wasn’t just a near-death experience for your social life…