Joey Rupcich shares all of his senior wisdom with Bwog—including shutting your brain off.

Name, School, Major, Hometown: Joey Rupcich, CC, English/Math double major, Madison, WI

Claim to fame: I got an award nomination from the Television Academy for a video where I shook my dick for a good 3 seconds. (I lost but here’s the link to watch it).

Where are you going? Like 5 blocks away from campus because my lease is through June. I moved out here to live my Liz Lemon dream and I’m staying here until I do dammit.

What are 3 things you learned at Columbia and would like to share with the Class of 2025?

1. Make sure you have time in your schedule to sit around and do nothing. I don’t mean free time, I mean literally time to just put on TLC shows as background noise and turn off your brain after a long week of pretending to pay attention in lectures. Have nights where you go party or whatever, but also have some time where you do nothing but exist as a palate cleanser for life. 

2. If you don’t want to be friends with someone, don’t! Just because you’re lonely and someone is convenient, or you know them from somewhere already, or they’re hot, doesn’t mean you need to spend time with them if you dislike them. You want quality over quantity, big time. And if you’re acquaintances with someone and want to be better friends with them, just go up to them and say “Hello ____,  we’re going to be friends now” and they’ll respect your power and go with it. 

3. If you’re going to throw up, do it somewhere else than the stairs right outside your building. You’re going to have to walk on those later and chances are they won’t be cleaned before then.

“Back in my day…” Columbia just started being good at football, Amigos just shut down, and you’d have to pretend to be interested in bitcoin to be polite to every econ bro you met.

Favorite Columbia controversy? When my music hum professor accidentally had one of the links in our assignments go to graphic, roleplay porn instead of the youtube link he meant.

What was your favorite class at Columbia? Introduction to Computational Literary Analysis with Jonathan Reeve. Super interesting material, pretty easy, and he’s a very nice professor. Honorable mention to any class in the math department with Gus Schrader because I want that man to rip me in half. I never missed a single class the 3 semesters I had with him because I didn’t want to miss seeing his jacked arms and imagining him choking me. Seriously, the hottest man I’ve seen on campus ever, and I own a mirror!

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? I’m from Wisconsin and I’m a slut so this is hard, but goodbye oral. I have other holes.

Whom would you like to thank? My wonderful boyfriend for being the love of my life, my parents, my brothers, my friends from John Jay 5 that are still my closest friends at Columbia and who I miss living with, The Columbia University Sketch Show for giving me a chance to explore my passions (see the dick-swinging video from above), the close friends from CUSS who stick with me even when I make us read borderline smut and subject them to my unwanted opinions, the several enemies I’ve accrued from my time here for keeping me on my toes, Justin Snider for answering every advising question I had and letting me take massive amounts of candy from him, my friends from back home who I miss every day and should really text more, my hot roommate for the first 2 weeks of sophomore year for showing me that I shouldn’t blindly trust hot people, and the girl reading this. :)

One thing to do before graduating: Have a hoe phase! Or transition into a full time hoe era if you’re like me! Sex is fun, so don’t be ashamed if you want to do a lot of it! Be safe, but an STI isn’t the end of the world, most of them you just get one shot and you’re good to go, not that I know from experience or anything. Beyond that, it’s great for networking. I’ve made so many friends out of random hook ups, including a tony nominated director, an executive at a non-profit which I won’t name but rhymes with The Shmevor Smoject, someone high up in corporate McDonalds, my friend’s boss, a writer for Shameless, and someone who I later found out was a missing person for about a week, just to name a few.

Any regrets? Honestly, this is cliche but not enjoying as much time with my friends as I wanted. Like obviously you can’t plan for covid style global lock downs, but take advantage of how easy it is to hang out with your friends when you all live in a 10 block radius of each other. Your homework or internship applications or whatever can wait, go out and get that drink with your friends, because you won’t know when the last time you’ll all be together is until you’re all scattered across the country.

Joey via Joey