I would like to take this opportunity to be the first to thank this year’s freshmen class for choosing this amazing institution to be the site for the advancement of their higher education. As a recent UMass graduate, I can whole-heartedly guarantee that four years from now you will emerge a drastically different human being, eight semesters older, eight semesters wiser and absolutely no closer to getting a decent job in the real world than you are today. When all is said and done, you will be $60,000 poorer and your liver will probably look a lot like Trachelle did after she flew head-first over the handle bars of that bike in “The Gauntlet” but hey, that’s the price of an education these days.

What it comes down to is the fact that freshmen year is like going through puberty all over again. You’ll be seeing hair in places you haven’t seen hair before (feminists with unshaven armpits, guys experimenting with cheesy goatees, and the mashed potatoes at the dining hall). You’ll be gaining a ton of weight in a very short period of time (Busch Light + D.P. Dough delivery – Varsity Field Hockey = Freshmen 15.) Then your hormones will be seeping into body parts you never knew existed. Anyway, to the Class of 2008, the following is your future, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it:

You will go to class, take notes, and eat at the dining hall. You will fall asleep in class, borrow that cute brunette-whose-name-you-can-never-remember’s notes, and get diarrhea from something you ate at the dining hall. You will be best friends with your roommate for the first month, get annoyed with her for playing that JoJo song 42 times a day, and eventually meet your real best friend and future roommate who lives down the hall. You will open up your refrigerator, hung over on a Sunday morning in hopes of stealing the last Poland Spring water bottle before your roommate wakes up. That water bottle will actually be filled with your roommate’s leftover Poland Spring vodka, and he will wake up to you throwing up all over yourself.

Your cell phone will ring (the OC theme song) in the middle of CompSci 105 because your roommate feels the need to keep you updated every time he goes to the bathroom. You will have one poster that always falls down (never while you’re in the room) no matter how much double-sided tape you apply. You will pass out with the official UMass recycling bin next to your bed, because, apparently, puke isn’t being recycled enough these days. You will put up an away message that says something along the lines of “Naked and Wet” when you’re in the shower, because apparently that’s a clever way of saying it and has never been done before.

You will get lost in the Morrill Science buildings. You will burn microwave popcorn at least 5 times, one of which will set off the fire alarm (and if you live on the 19th floor of John Quincy Adams…well, have fun with that). You will realize that the molasses/soy sauce crap they put on the sidewalks to melt snow on campus is absolutely useless after you fall on your ass in front of a large tour group. You will pay the $10 House Council Fee and not use the vacuum cleaner once.

You will yell, “I’m Rick James, bitch!” at a party and people will give you weird looks, partly because he’s dead, but mostly because that was so last year. You will think about declaring your major roughly 87 times and end up not doing it at all because the walk is too far. Your forehead will get drawn on with permanent marker, most likely in the form of a penis or a funny word like Hoobastank. You will not notice this until your final look-in-the-mirror-before-class and you will be 10 minutes late because you couldn’t wash the damn thing off. You will talk to your friends from home on AOL Instant Messenger roughly 41 seconds fewer every day than you did the day before. You will visit one of these friends at their respective schools and come home swearing, “she’s changed” (translation: she has more friends at school than you do).

I guess I’ll stop there and let you write the rest of your history yourselves, but I’ll leave you with this: your high school career was dominated by what everyone else thought of you – their short-sighted preconceptions about your personality, your reputation, and your arbitrary position in the social food chain. Unfortunately, those preconceptions were usually misconceptions, and even more unfortunately, they just so happened to precede you at all times. As you walked through those familiar halls each day, you may have been seen as “the dork”, or “the YGLM” (young girl with loose morals), or “the kid that crapped his pants in gym class that one time,” and there was nothing you could do about it.

But the moment you arrived here and unpacked your parents’ SUV, you left those things behind. The Etch-a-Sketch has officially been shaken, and each new person that enters your life gives you a chance to turn the knobs and reveal a new ragged mess of bent-ass lines representing the person you see in the mirror every morning. So if I could offer you one piece of advice, it would have to be this: the left knob is for horizontal, the right is for vertical, and no matter what, do not attempt this during bumpy car-rides.

Welcome to the best four years of your lives, kids. Now don’t f— this up.

Matt Brochu is a UMass graduate student.