Peer Pressure is When You're Pressured by Peers

Well, I am done with my first college overnight visit, to the University of Chicago. I have decided not to go there, for several reasons, not just because of the story that I am about to tell, although it is fun to pretend that.

I was assigned to a dormitory called Shoreland that was a mile away from the campus, near the lake, and we had to take a bus to get to it. The building apparently used to be a hotel in the 1920s, and now it was old and they were going to stop using it. My room was on the eleventh floor. When I got to the room that I was assigned to, I was slightly surprised that there didn't seem to be any space on the floor for me to sleep on. My roommate assured me that he would somehow manage to clean it up enough that I could lay out my sleeping bag, and then I went out to meet the other people to go to dinner.

It turned out that our dining hall was on campus, which seems a bit counter-intuitive to me since we were living a mile away from campus. We took the bus to campus and ate dinner at our House table (I heard someone comment that college was like Harry Potter--although I think Yale would be the real equivalent to Hogwarts). Then we went to an extra-curricular fair of some sort, in which there were tables and performances to see.  This included an improv show, one act of which involved a parody of an anti-peer pressure PSA.  

When this was over, we could not find our hosts, or as we preferred to call them, our people. We decided to take the bus back to campus, but we missed the first one. By the time the next bus arrived, there was quite a crowd of people who wanted to go back to Shoreland, and we all managed to fit--completely compacted in, like sardines, as they say.

Back at the dormitory, we decided to take the stairs up the eleven floors instead of the elevator just for fun. Not knowing quite what to do or where our "people" were, we sat in the common room for a while. Occasionally, some college students would walk by, we might say some things to them, and then they would disappear. At one point, however, a boy who realized that we had nothing to do offered to take us to his room, where we could have some "fun."

"What are we going to do here?" someone wondered.

"Probably just sit, like before, except now we'll be in a room."

We walked in, to see that there were several college students in there, some of them sitting around a table playing some kind of game with chips and drinking yellowish drinks out of small glasses.
 
"We have some orphaned prospies," our introducer said, explaining that our hosts had left us alone, so we were orphaned (and prospies meant prospective students).  

"We're just sheep," one of us commented, "and we just need a shepherd to tell us what to do."

It turned out that they wanted to take us to a fraternity party.  "Anyone who wants to go, write your name and your cell phone number on this blackboard."  A bunch of us proceeded to do so, one by one.  

One girl said, "I was thinking that I would stay here." 

But a college student girl, wearing a tight mini skirt, said, "Oh, but the frat party is part of the tour!  You should come."

"Oh, in that case, I'll come."  She then wrote her name on the board.  

Soon mini skirt girl offered us drinks.  "Does anyone want a drink?  I always like to have a drink before I go to the parties because there's no guarantee that at the party you will actually get one!"  She then added, "I'll make them especially weak for you."  

At this point, I decided to discreetly escape from the room, and I went to join my host, who was working on an essay and playing Guitar Hero. 

Strange, after seeing that improv show to then experience the kind of situation that always seems to be just a crazy made-up example.

-Philip