Dear Orientation: you failed me. Miserably.

As an 18-year-old high school graduate, I naively assumed that you would tell me all I needed to know about the Binghamton University experience. After all, you were so well-organized — with your information packets and Orientation Advisers in their matching shirts, how could I not have faith in you to prepare me for the trials and tribulations of college life?

Having fully embraced the happy delusions you’d implanted in my brain, you can imagine how crestfallen I was when reality set in. Listed below are just a few of the things that you grazed over when we met at Indoctrin … er, Orientation.

1) Professors Don’t Know Everything: In fact, some of them don’t know much. Free life lesson: respect should be earned, never given. Simply because someone has a Ph.D. hanging on their wall does not make him or her God. Some of my fellow students would have you believe that professors conspire to thrust their agendas upon us. The truth is much more frightening. The moment you step on to this campus, understand that the real world has effectively melted away. People actually believe in their own brand of bullshit here. A professor that compares Bush to Hitler or Marx to Christ isn’t running a PR campaign for communism; he’s showing you the “right path.” Don’t be afraid to freebase a dose of reality to counteract the crazy pills they hand out at the classroom door.

2) Everything Fun is Illegal: Drugs and alcohol are fantastic. We’re told they’re dangerous substances that can cause all sorts of horrible things, and there’s a debatable amount of truth to that, but just do what the rest of us do: disregard your personal safety and have a good time anyway. Better to enjoy these things while they’re still innocent fun. Before you know it, you’ll be relying on them to survive your workday and it’ll be less of a pleasure and more of a suicide deterrent.

3) “Friend” is a Relative Term: We’re going through a very transient period in our lives and our natural inclination is to latch onto like-minded people for support as we travel together on the path to adulthood. How cute. If at all possible, however, try and develop the foresight to recognize which “friends” will be MIA when you’ve smoked all your pot, drunk all your beer and used up all your gas. Chances are good that then you’ll find them in your bedroom, boning your significant other. At the very least, try and find someone who’ll be courteous enough to change the sheets.

4) Real Life Sucks, Stay Here as Long as You Can: Do you know what I did today? I woke up at noon, looked at porn for an hour (in an aesthetic way), watched cable television all afternoon and started drinking at 6 p.m. While there’s nothing remarkable about this schedule to any normal college student, the outside world would view it as a gross waste of time. This is the same reason that the outside world sucks. They throw around phrases like “useful” and “contributive to society” not because they want you to change. They’re just jealous. Very, very jealous. Who are they to define the parameters of “knowledge” anyway? Fine, so I may not know (or care) about Rousseau’s political treatises, but I’ll be damned if I haven’t seen every single episode of “The Golden Girls.”

Accomplishment? I’d like to think so. The way I see it, as long as your parents or the Federal government are willing to foot the bill, why not stay as long as humanly possible?