Aaron Karo - Ruminations on College Life

When I first arrived on campus at the University of Pennsylvania, I quickly gained the Freshman 15the ability to drink fifteen beers in one sitting.

On Sunday nights I would try to take a break from the drunken mayhem and rest up for the coming week. However, since my body was so messed up from the weekends festivities, I could never fall asleep. As I tossed and turned for hours, all these funny thoughts and observations about college life kept bouncing around in my head. One Sunday night I finally decided to write them down, and the next day I emailed them to twenty of my friends from high school. Ruminations on College Life was born.

Each month throughout my freshman year I continued to email out an issue of Ruminations . The emails consisted of all my funny stories and anecdotes about college life that I thought up on sleepless Sunday nights. Soon my friends began forwarding it to their friends, who then emailed me to be added to my mailing list.

As I kept writing during my sophomore year, my mailing list kept growing and growing, and I created AaronKaro.com to hold all the old issues. By my junior year, Ruminations on College Life had become an international phenomenon as thousands upon thousands of pre-froshes, college kids, and alumni joined my list. My issues were used to teach English to students in Finland and Austria and were the subject of term papers and class projects from Syracuse to UCLA.

By the time of my graduation from Penn in May 2001, I had over 11,000 subscribers around the world. The drunken ramblings of a sleepless college freshman had evolved into something I could never have imagined. After graduation I tried to get all my Ruminations published, the right people saw them, and the result is in your hands right now.

If youre reading this in the bookstore, take a look around. There are tons of books about college. Some will tell you what classes to take and others will tell you how to deal with an unruly roommate. But none will tell you what really goes down in the tiny dorm rooms and frat-house basements of colleges across the nation and around the world. This one will.

I hope you will read my book and laugh out loud. Because whether youre going to college soon, currently surviving it, or already a grizzled alum, the college experience is universal. It is also absurd and ridiculous. So get comfortable on your extra-long twin, crack open a case of cheap beer, and read on. And whatever campus you call home, always remember, college is a joke!

Your freshman year of college is supposed to be a new beginning.

You emerge from the summer following your graduation from high school pretty much hating your hometown and everyone in it. You look forward to college as a chance to start fresh, to make new friends and begin a new phase in your life. Then you get to college and immediately start hanging out with everyone who goes there from your high school, and youre constantly instantmessaging and emailing your friends from home. Thats because freshman year isnt a whole new phase of your life; its really just another place to participate in underage drinking and trying to get laid.

As a freshman, youre the lowest of the low. You dont know anybody, you cant find anything, and no one seems to want to explain anything to you. But everyone knows what its like to be a freshman, so you have to use it to your advantage: Excuse me, young man, why are you twenty minutes late for class? Your response: Im sorry, Im a freshman and I got lost. Yo, dude, you just threw up all over my girlfriend! Your response: Im sorry, Im a freshman and Im wasted. And theyll understand.

In the end, being a college freshman is like being a fetus. Youre helpless, you still rely on your mom for pretty much everything, and you have no clue what the hell is going on. By the end of the year, youre wasted off your rocker, still completely clueless, and passed out on your dorm-room floor in the fetal position.

THE FIRST WEEK of college feels kind of like camp. Youve got enough clothes to last you a few weeks, youre sleeping in a little bed, and you write letters to your parents and friends. After two months I was like, OK, this has been fun, but the summer is over now, time to go home. The RA was in the hallway stopping dazed kids from leaving. They were all packed up saying, Wait, you mean this isnt camp? But it feels just like camp! What? Four more years?