The frats are either going to permanently ban me from future parties or appoint me to become their designated party planner because of this article. At this point, I’m not sure which outcome sounds worse.

If you have any familiarity with our sad excuse of a party scene at Columbia (so basically, if you aren’t a student at SEAS) you’ve probably attended one of the frat parties hosted this year and had a miserable time dressing up in accordance to one of their incredibly lame themes. If you think I’m exaggerating, here are just two of some of the more recent themes I’ve heard: one frat hosted a “white out,” which basically required attendees to buy a cheap white dress with the opacity level of the toilet paper in the Sulz floor 3 bathrooms that you’d be okay with a frat guy destroying by dumping paint on you, and “hometown throwdown,” where you dress up as something or someone symbolic of your home state. To be honest, hometown throwdown is by far the worse-sounding theme, mainly because why would I voluntarily reveal that I’m a Floridian to anyone? As an act of service, I decided to extend the olive branch to the residents of frat row and provide a list of frat party theme ideas that I feel everyone would be able to love and enjoy. I would say in exchange I would like a permanent spot on your list to get full access to whatever frat I want, but I would make such a request under the pretense that I actually like your parties or believed that you could properly execute my ideas. I think a more fitting tradeoff would be for you guys to swipe me into Cafe East (please there’s nothing I want more in this world than to try the on-campus boba but Barnard students don’t have access to that Cafe). Thank you, and I hope you like my ideas!

– Party with Prezbae: dress up as your favorite tree in honor of sending her off to New Hampshire (whatever that state is!)

– Victorian-era theme (dress up in the attire of a character from Little Women)

– Dress up as your favorite member of the British monarchy 

– Dress up as your favorite problematic alumni (ex: Martha Stewart)

– Dress up as your least favorite professor

– Getting lit(hum) aka dress up as characters from The Iliad

– Dress up as the different people each Barnumbia building is named after (ex: Cheryl Glicker Milstein and Philip Milstein)

– Dress up as a campus celebrity (the person that doesn’t even know who you are but all your friends always talk about them)

– Favorite billionaire party (they all dress as Elon Musk)

– “I can’t believe you wore that”/most controversial theme. Competition to see which outfit gets talked about the most 

– Dress up as your dream school that rejected you 

– Dress up as your favorite (or least favorite) ex and act like them for the duration of the party. Bonus points if they’re there

– Party where you wear either your heaviest heat-insulating layer or most exposing, as close to underwear as possible outfit: choose to be sweaty and dying, or cold and miserable

– Party where the music is just entirely too loud to talk to someone so you have to yell in someone’s ear, but everyone’s wearing some kind of half-working noise-cancelling device that makes it difficult but just barely possible to hear if someone’s screaming right next to your face at the top of their lungs

Frat Row via Bwarchives