Or: how to use your bold beautiful Barnard brain to fight the sign-in policy and party hard in the face of a system that doesn’t want to see you succeed. 

Picture this: it’s 11:30, Friday night. You and your five friends are all dolled up in your best black jeans and white chunky sneakers and/or Chelsea boots. That sparkly/striped/graphic long sleeve top you’re wearing? Excellent choice. The quirky earrings you bought from that Instagram ad? Lookin’ dynamite. After pregaming White Claws in your Quad dorm, you and the crew rush across Broadway, saunter past Low, edge by the weird tooth sculpture, and end up at East Campus, only to learn that there’s no one there to sign you in. Even if you could find someone, there are six of you, exceeding the sign-in policy by one whole person. What’s a Barnardian to do after exhausting their contact list for every CC senior they’ve met in a Poli Sci discussion section or Mel’s? Or, hey, is that the roommate of the friend of your older sibling’s first boyfriend that lives in an EC Suite?

I think I’ve come up with a solution.

Next time you and your pals decide to ditch Frat Row and seek the high life at an EC party, consider packing a handy dandy trenchcoat in your NSOP-provided Barnard tote bag. Check Barnard Buy/Sell/Trade for a plethora of fashionable and cheap options if you don’t have one, or perhaps just steal the Canada Goose you saw someone use to save a seat in Butler. Use the teamwork and friendship you’ve created among your Barnard Babes, scale the fountain in the center of the Quad, and use that height to climb onto your friend’s shoulders. It may be a bit wobbly at first, but with perseverance, grit, and determination, there is nothing a slightly tipsy and sleep-deprived first-year can’t do! Artfully arrange the trenchcoat to cover the face and torso of the person below you; given the extraordinary height of many a Barnard student, it won’t look too out of the ordinary when a nine-foot tall person comes a-knockin’ at the EC sign-in desk. Added bonus: it can get cold at night here in the Big Apple, and this is probably one more layer than you were originally planning on wearing, given the lack of adequate coat check at most nightlife on campus. By the time you get across campus, more likely than not getting down to some classic tunes including and not limited to “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield and the power ballad of a generation, the “Hoedown Throwdown,” someone in your friend group will have gotten a text back from a near-stranger who lives in EC that is willing to sign y’all in. You line up in front of the pearly glass three-foot gates to enter EC—you’ve made it! As you and your friends sign in, the guard barely looks up from the soccer game they are watching sans headphones. The person on top hands their ID over and voilà! You’ve made it!! Enjoy your evening of dancing to TikTok hits and unholy Svedka-Redbull cocktails, hitting up JJ’s on the way home, complaining about the chastity gates, and waking up the next day just to do it all again that evening.

Update as of February 27

This post has been changed in response to a comment, we apologize for the insensitivity of our previous remarks.

The dreaded EC wait and daytime EC via Bwog Archives, Art via Bwoggers, Doc Martens via Dr. Martens, Barnard tote via Barnard Store