You worked hard to get here. Now's the time for fun.

When somebody tells you that the four years that he spent at Yale were the best of his life, he isn't thinking about his classes. No sane person looks back nostalgically on intro microeconomics, paper-induced sleep deprivation, or three-hour finals. It's not that all these things aren't rewarding. It's that they are also very, very painful. After three hours of writing, your hand cramps up into a contorted, marginally useful claw and stays that way for the rest of the day. Suffice to say, neither The Simpsons nor Guinness produces this effect.

Most of you already know what you're really looking forward to this September. Sure, you're excited about having 2,000 classes to choose from instead of the 10 you had in high school. But what you really can't wait for is the chance to have some fun. After spending at least the past four years with the same people, it's time to meet somebody new. After four years of weekends when you had a choice between one more bad keg party or sitting on your rump yet again, it's time to enjoy college.

You may not have heard this yet, but college is a lot easier than high school. Except for foreign language and science courses, classes meet only three or four times a week, including sections, some of which are optional. That equals a ton of free time. What's more, the courses you're taking often don't demand that much effort.

If you haven't already learned the art of selective homework, you'll discover here that many supposedly required assignments are neither necessary nor enforced. Nobody in a big history lecture cares if you did the reading, especially when the professor's lectures are basically summaries of what you would have read. Every once in a while, you need to write a paper or take an exam, but some frantic research or cramming can make up for a semester's worth of slacking. Why stretch out over three months the trouble you could be done with in a couple days?

As easy as it is to avoid work, it's also important to remember that expectations aren't always that high, either. Grade inflation means that, while it's tough to get an A in a course, a B is pretty easy. Show up regularly to your classes and put aside some time for studying and paper writing. You almost have to try to fail. I heard about a girl who failed a fall semester course after she woke up with a massive hangover, showed up halfway through the final, and took it on two hours of sleep. That's about the only way to fail here. Even if you don't pass a course, it's freshman year. Nobody looks at these grades anyway.

If you're smart, you'll use this blessed impunity to full advantage. There has to be something you've really wanted to do for a while. Now is the time to try. There's a lot of stuff at Yale, and most of it is decidedly not academic. In fact, doing just about anything, whether it's music, drama, writing, or partying, is going to drop your grades at least a little. However, you'll probably have a much better time doing any of those things than sitting inside every night and studying. If I looked back on four years of Yale and saw nothing but one very long study session, I'd probably regret my time here. Of course, I won't be doing that.

When I came to Yale, I followed my interests and got rewardingly overinvolved. I met a great group of people. We hang out, we party, and we cause general mayhem. It's a fun time. While I certainly enjoy classes, it's these people that have really made Yale for me.

One of the truly beautiful facets of life at Yale is the general intelligence of the students here. With the exception of a few legacies and athletic recruits (not to say that all legacies and recruits are dumb—they aren't), almost everybody at Yale is capable of having an interesting conversation about something. These conversations may be more instructive than anything you'll ever hear in a classroom. I spent many a night sitting up until the wee hours of the morning, talking and arguing with friends about topics ranging from the Crimean War to why Super Mario Brothers 2 was, as one of my suitemates so eloquently put it, "the Citizen Kane of video games."

I'm sure that I missed a few classes because of rehearsals or random discussions. I don't think that those classes really mattered, though. In the end, my grades came out okay, and I had a much better time overall. If I wanted to, I could have been a lot more academic this year, but it really wouldn't have been worth it. I'm reaping the rewards of the work it took to get in here and loving Yale. You're in college. Enjoy it.

Back to Head of the Class...