Sherman Ave Freshman Guide: Your Dorm Room

This is probably how you want your dorm room to look.

This is probably not how your dorm room is going to look.

We want to drunkenly live-tweet a movie, and we want YOUR input!

If you haven’t yet noticed, we Sherman Aviators really like live-tweeting things.*  We also like fermented beverages, or as known in some social circles, DRANK.  We’ve decided to put these two things together to provide the world with a live-tweeted drunken fiasco, because clearly there aren’t yet enough of those.  However, since you are our humble readers, we want to include you in the decision, so we made a cute little poll with some potential movies for the live-tweeting.  Whichever movie wins the most votes will be the one out of which we live-tweet the living shit!

*We also acknowledge that we are hopeless, pathetic sacks of excrement.

Sherman Ave Freshman Guide: Bicycles at NU

Testicular cancer? No way bro.

Before I came to Northwestern, it had been 3 years since I had ridden a bicycle for, well, socially acceptable purposes. Like most high school students, I felt that riding a bicycle was incredibly lame compared to owning a car, and even though most students at my high school did not own a car, getting a ride from your mom was still considered cooler than riding your bicycle (LOGIC BOMB). Nowadays, riding your bike is “hip,” “cool,” “environmentally friendly,” “a political endorsement of socialism,” etc. At Northwestern, riding your bike is a super viable way of getting to such important locations as: the student center that no one is close to; that place on Clarke that’s practically off-campus but for some reason they have classes there; your local alcohol purveyor; and many more. It’s important to understand whether owning and operating a bicycle at NU is the right decision for you. The following is a personal 2^nd amendment-centric manifesto confessional sexual novel handy guide on biking at NU.

5 Prerequisites for Being a College Professor

Professors.  Sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them, and sometimes you’re absolutely horrified by their lack of judgment in allowing a woman to be fucksawed in an after-class demonstration.  But regardless of how we feel about our professors, the inevitable truth is that we spend an average of 15-20 hours a week listening to them speak (except for Comm majors, who rarely scratch the double-digits).  With all this time we spend with these educational overlords, we begin to pick up on their habits pretty quickly.  These are the five things that, judging from experience, are crucial characteristics of anyone aspiring to be a college professor.

To operate Powerpoint, you must first find the Holy Grail.

5.  A Complete Inability to Use Basic Technology

It’s quite astounding that someone can be intelligent and driven enough to be a leader in their field of study, but never learn how to operate a fucking projector.  If one were to tally up every minute of lecture lost because a professor was trying to figure out how to play a 30-second video clip, it very well might eclipse the number of minutes spent trying desperately to set a high score on Tetris during lecture.  The funniest part is when the professor, frantically trying to remedy the situation, starts mindlessly changing settings on his/her computer, which – more often that not – already has Mandarin as the default language.

 

4.  An Irreconcilable Misunderstanding of Appropriate E-mail Length

Picture this: It’s a warm, sunny Friday afternoon.  You’ve just gone for a lengthy walk around campus, or perhaps you’ve already started day-drinking in preparation for a Disney Channel Original Movie Marathon.  You quickly check your e-mail before dinner, when suddenly – BAM!  It’s a 3,000-word juggernaut from a professor, providing your 200-person lecture with a detailed explanation of necessary background information for the next week’s readings.  This distasteful offense is especially common among professors of history or political science classes.  Instead of listing a very simply who-what-where-when-why-how, professors generally prefer to word-vomit an incoherent score of paragraphs explaining every detail of 11^th century Indian Ocean trade that you could ever imagine.

Smiling sadistically as you attempt to pronounce his last name

3.  Being Indian

This is fairly self-explanatory.

2.  A Devastating Lack of Visual Coherence

I’ll be honest – I am by no means a fashionista.  In fact, I’d go so far to say I rarely give fucks about whether or not what I’m wearing would give a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy cast member a deadly heart attack.  But sometimes professors take it too far.  For example, consider something I call the “4-inch buffer” – the area within 4 inches above and below the belt buckle, where a male professor’s tie never manages to reside.  Typically, it’s either scraping their knees or hovering at their ribcage.

Style unawareness can also be incredibly adorable.

There are several other notable styles of a professor’s failure to comply with basic fashion norms; the “shirt-so-wrinkled-that-you-can’t-actually-comprehend-how-many-times-they’ve-worn-it”, the “pants-they’ve-worn-seven-lectures-in-a-row,” and the “sweater vest” are among the most common infractions.

1.  A Tendency to Namedrop at Every Possible Opportunity

Here’s a peculiar difference between college students and professors.  College students like to ascribe a specific title to each relationship; instead of merely saying “she’s my friend,” we prefer to say “she’s my PoliSci 385 Study Buddy!” or “she was Halloween hook-up #4!” or “she’s my pledge wife!” Professors, on the other hand, have one word for everyone they know:  Colleague (henceforth referred to as the C-bomb).  Professors throw around the C-bomb when it makes them appear to have more authority.  Phrases like “my [C-bomb] in the U.N.” and “my [C-bomb] in the Senate” are thus very common phrases used by professors, when in reality, it would probably be more suitable for them to simply refer to them as “an expert in the field who I kind of met once and who sadly declined the offer to sign my breasts.”