Baby Bwogger and real-life mistake-maker Cole lists the five tragedies that will strike every first-year student at Columbia.

Imagine this: you just arrived, and you’re ready to jump right into discussing the Iliad (or doing whatever SEAS students do)! But later that evening, you find yourself clutching a pillow in a dark room, wondering why you made that horrendous, h o r r e n d o u s Facebook introduction post all those months ago. Here are five things that will happen to you during your first weeks at Columbia that will haunt you in your darkest hours for ​at least​ the next four years:

1. If you’re stupid like me, and can’t read or have the attention span of a saltine mixed with the anxiety of a caffeinated rat, you will think you’re going to the right building for U Writing. You’re not. Pupin is not Philosophy. I don’t care if they both start with p’s. Kent is not Kraft. Stop thinking about mac and cheese. This critical error will result in you being not only late for your first class ever but also forever known as the one who walked in looking like one of those really wet tomatoes you see in Subway ads.
2. So you’ve got on your Martha Stewart bathrobe (Go Barnard!), your fun pair of plastic sandals, and you’re all ready for your first College Shower. Go you! But guess who is waiting for you in the stall? It’s not the intense water pressure or the scalding heat. It’s definitely not enough hooks to keep your shit on. It’s a roach! Congratulations, you’ve encountered the one constant in your life here at Columbia: Roaches.
3. You’ve had one or two meals at John Jay and you think to yourself, “Hm – this place is warm and smells funny but the food is ok,” and as such, you decide that you’ll be putting only the best Ferris food in your body for the next several months. And then a couple days pass and you hear some friends mention something called JJ’s. Curious, but mostly because it was Sunday and Ferris was closed, you go to check it out. Wow, they really have fried mac and cheese triangles. (Note: I did not plan on mentioning mac and cheese twice in this article, it just happened.) So you grab some of those and some of these and a handful of chips and a cold brew and sit down for some serious self-care. Except you forget you’re lactose intolerant, and, oh shit, you just threw up in the bathroom you share with 13 other people! Instead of saying “there, there,” they’ll ask if you cleaned it up.
4. It’s still NSOP and you’re looking forward to the EcoReps sale and plan on getting up super early to snatch a cute fridge to keep your Korean sheet masks in, or food, or whatever (this is a no-judgment post). Then you check GroupMe and spot some hearsay about several fridges being up for grabs AT NO COST in front of Wien. Laughing on your way there because you’re 13 and think Wien sounds like wiener (which I heard is what we call people who live there), you see a small congregation and fear that all the fridges have been spoken for. Upon further inspection, this is not the case. You make your way towards one that looks a little beaten up but sure, this will do. You open it. That was your first mistake. Pools of hot soy sauce and colonies of fuzzy mold meet your gaze. This is the most biodiversity you will see in the next four years. Then you take a deep breath and the smell is akin to leaving milk in a hot place for a few weeks and letting some maggots go to town. Moments later, you find yourself bent over a public trashcan, and you can’t tell if your eyes are watering from the smell or the emotional impact of not having a free fridge.
5. You’re super excited about the new foreign language class you’re taking and can’t wait to improve! The lessons are fun, and your classmates are nice. It seems everything is going well! Even the homework is light and doesn’t cause you any extra stress – that is, until you receive an email from the professor sent to everyone in the class. It’s basically the formal version of a subtweet, in which your professor begs the class (literally just you) not to use a pen on your homework because you keep crossing things out and he cannot understand the hieroglyphs that are your handwriting and you can tell he has one grain of patience left for your bullshit and, oh my god, use a pencil please don’t make this mistake I can no longer show my face in Kent Hall.

OK. Maybe none of these things happened to you, because you’re not a magnet for embarrassment and misfortune and have at least one brain cell. Good luck conquering each day in spite of the dumb shit you may do!

Orpheus and Eurydice because we go to Columbia via Bwarchives