Babson College is where boys become drunken boys, and girls become Nils' (the smarmy German exchange student) sexual playthings. Sure it sounds like a good time is being had by all - certainly by Nils - but a certain evil is perpetrated at this school. Not immediately visible, it creeps up on you; you realize that "this place blows". In order to add a sense of closure to this school year, I will now recount the events of this past year for your enjoyment.

It all started in September, I was thrown into an awkward social situation - I was at a new school and I now had to "make friends." Luckily the Internet had come (partially) to my rescue over the summer, in the form of the "Babson Exchange", an online message board that lame computer-geek incoming freshman were encouraged to congregate around and swap stories of computer gaming, and to argue about various computer-related issues. Through my lack of a life, and my addiction to all things digital, I managed to rack up quite a few posts to this message board; and through those posts, I met some of the key players in my fall semester.

Introducing Melen: Alex was quite possibly the only person who more enthusiastically ran to their computer to access the Babson Exchange than me. When I first logged on, Alex had already posted 10-20 messages - all he did was ask questions about the Babson laptop program, and then complain when he got the answers. He signed all of his postings, "Alex Melen, CEO - t35.com".

Introducing Berto: Berto was the second key person to contact me from the Babson message board. At first I thought his incomprehensible language, and strange stories were a product of his Hawaiian upbringing, but now I am sure that he is just retarded.

Introducing Lennon: My first contact with Lennon was through Berto, who informed me that Lennon was looking for people to go to a Rolling Stones concert in September. Naturally, I agreed to go. Lennon would later come to define the phrase "I can't believe I drank the WHOLE THING."

Then of course, there was my roommate, "Max" - he was from Massachusetts, and because of this, had that strange genetic deformity that caused him to talk funny. A Boston accent is defined by the melding of all vowels (all of them) into a single super-vowel pronounced "ahhhheehhh." Max's term as my roommate was short-lived, he moved out before the end of add/drop, leaving me with a single room for the rest of the semester. The real shame in his move was the noticeable lack of beer in my room after his departure, Max always kept the fridge stocked, courtesy of his 21 year old sister.

The first week at Babson consisted of a lot of boring-ass orientation bullshit that is common to every college. On one of these days, there was a Boston-harbor cruise - the "booze cruise" as some called it. This was really my first opportunity to get shit-faced at Babson, and it was a success. I spent most of the night "chillin'" with Max and his stoner friends; I did escape to another party for a short while though.

The next morning I learned the first two rules of College. The first rule is, that if you are going to drink the night before you have a class (or orientation session) at 8am, you must either blow that class off entirely, and stay in bed, or get so drunk that you will still be drunk in the morning. It really is hell to try and sit through this shit when you are hung-over. The second rule is that if an entire class full of people is either still drunk or hung-over from the night before, it can only result in hilarity, and one very pissed professor.

The other main event of that first week was the Rolling Stones concert. I drove Lennon, Berto, and Brett (the weird-ass Californian) to Foxboro, Mass for this concert. Along the way, we got stuck in massive amounts of traffic, during which time Lennon spotted a car with three gorgeous college-aged women in the other lane - naturally made it our objective to wave/honk/etc. at these girls (yes, there were four of us and three of them, but Berto didn't count). Later, as we were walking to the stadium, we would encounter these girls again - they were still driving, and Brett decided to run into the middle of the road, chasing their car to try (in vain) to get their numbers. As for the concert itself, it was great, and I have never seen so many stoned 60-year olds...

One of the predominant aspects of this fall was Babson's obsession with the computer game, Warcraft 3. People would drop everything to participate in a game - they would put it all aside, studying-be-damned. Everyone's GPA was a solid 1.0 to 1.5 lower than what it could have been without that game. It was a game that brought us all together under a common purpose (to beat each other) and slogan ("Berto, you suck at Craft").

Of course, one of the dominant aspects of Babson life was FME (Foundation Management Experience), a course that everyone took. The marketing behind this class was "Be a CEO in Your First Year of College!" This of course was highly misleading; first of all, the class consisted of an uncomfortable mixture of accounting and information technology, shoe-horned on top of which was a "field project." It was this "field project" that the marketing refers too - in FME we started our own business. Of course that part of the class (the "fun" part) came near the end of the semester, and was minimized in the calculation of our final grades.

When we did start the "field project" I managed to end up in the group that made a joke out of the entire process. We spent hours debating which of a variety of stupid names and marketing slogans to give our business. We fudged our numbers and took pride in doing it. We were like a small-scale Enron - except, when we went bust, Playboy didn't want to photograph our women...

FME was taught by a professorial dream team of Professors Nemitz and Santino. Nemitz was old enough to be my grandfather's dad, and he was about as boring as a very-sedated Al Gore. An insomniac could easily get an hour of sleep when this guy was lecturing. Then there was Professor Santino, who although certainly less monotonous, failed to provide any knowledge to his students during a lecture - but didn't fail to use other professor?s exams to test us.

Other Professors of note from Babson:

1) Fritz: alias Prof. Fleischmann - a German historian who taught sociology and had a keen interest in gender studies, a male feminist... he also was unusually interested by homoeroticism.
2) Prof. Kampen: A sociologist (or maybe psychologist?) who taught Rhetoric (public speaking/writing). She assigned the world's-most-ridiculous papers, and graded then with her trademark devil-may-care attitude.
3) Prof. Pachamanova: aka "he Russian woman" - a Russian math professor (cliché?) who failed me on everything she could find means to fail me on. She was probably pissed that I played Warcraft and surfed the Internet in her class. In the end, I am honor bound to never speak ill of this Professor again, because she changed my grade to a C so that I could transfer her class to Villanova.
4) Prof. Kirschner: I got an A - I also ignored the lectures, never did the reading, and surfed the Internet and chatted on AIM during class. Best-Class-EVER.

It was about two months into the semester that I decided that I couldn't stand Babson anymore. I couldn't stand any of it - the classes, the professors, my fellow "students", and especially not the chorus to "Sweet Caroline" sung by a choir of drunken freshmen at 3am.

During my first semester I was introduced to college life. Melen taught me that drinking [Nils'] beer and playing Warcraft was the ideal way to spend a Thursday night. Lennon taught me that there really isn't a limit to how much alcohol the liver of a 19 year old can process. Berto taught me... Berto taught me that as bad as my life can get, I'd always be smarter than Berto.

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