At 18-years-old, you have no money. You have no game. Your life experience is limited to getting fired from a part-time gig at the driving range and totaling your mom’s Saturn Ion junior year. In sum, you’re a lost little douche who’s still five or six years away from paying their own cell phone bill.
Besides a Facebook network and the freedom to butt chug, college offers an opportunity to reinvent yourself. For many an awkward, pigeonholed high school kid, the first day on campus is a chance to re-introduce themselves to the world. In most cases, this is an unfortunate occasion.
Grab a pencil and take notes, this is an important lesson on the 10 Types of Douchebags You Meet in College.
10. The No-Nonsense R.A.
There’s a new sheriff in town and at 22-years-old, he patrols the fifth floor of Morris Hall in sweatpants and a pair of worn Crocs and still expects to be taken seriously. When it comes to spotting red cups, this guy has a laser-like focus that’s unrivaled. If you crank that Taylor Swift a decibel too loud, he’s kicking down your door and serving your ass with a “quiet hours violation.” When he’s not on Brazzers.com in his deluxe dorm suite, he’s following the faint stench of a bong hit through the halls like bloodhound in John Wayne Gacy’s crawl space. If there’s one thing this asthmatic virgin knows how to do, it’s regulate.
9. The No. 1 Fan
There’s something about incurable venereal diseases and exorbitant tuition costs that creates an unyielding devotion to college sports teams, especially for the jackass chock-full of school spirit. Look, your college is already charging you $100K for a worthless bachelor’s degree, don’t degrade yourself further by sporting a neon body sock in the bleachers and bragging about next year’s “ridiculously talented recruit class.” There’s nothing more pathetic than being a groupie for teenage, amateur athletes. Get a grip, dude.
8. The Frat-So-Hard Jackass
This is a Complex public service announcement. Before you rush a fraternity for philanthropic and beer funneling reasons, understand that you’ll spend a semester getting hazed by a college senior who’s two or three internships away from landing their first entry level job. Cleaning the vomit-soaked toilet at the Pike house with a toothbrush is hardly worth an invite to the Theta formal. Calling beers “sodies,” having a membership at LA Tan, and an affinity for dubstep remixes are not becoming of a kid who got a 29 on their ACT. Also, khaki shorts don’t always have to be paired with boat shoes. You’re in college, bruh. Think outside of the box.
7. The Enlightened One
It’s amazing how one introductory course in environmental science can turn a 20-year-old into an Biofuels expert. The problem with college kids is that they’re ignorant to the browbeaten realities of living life in a cubicle and they have nothing but free time to get jacked up on MotherJones.com articles about oil companies. By your 29th birthday, you’ll realize that you can’t change the world, especially when your idea of “activism” is nodding along with like-minded bozos in a campus coffee shop.
6. The College Bar Manager
The bar floors are sticky, the drinks are watered down, and the air is permeated with Axe body spray and petrified vomit. To the rest of the world, he’s just a college town “lifer” who extracts tapeworms from keg lines for a living. But he can pull rank to get a free round Jello shots, and that makes him intensely popular with the Tri Delts. Universities boast Nobel Prize winners and Rhodes scholars, but none of them are as popular as the guy who can pull a group freezing Kappa Deltas to the front of the wrap-around line on “Thirsty Thursday.” And that’s pretty douchey.
5. The We-Get-It-You-Party Girl
There’s a thin line between being a fun drunk and acting like an extra in a Ke$ha video. And that line is typically crossed while chasing a handful of Molly’s with Skol Vodka out of the plastic bottle. You like to party, we get it. We just saw you gracelessly thrash about a fraternity basement to “Thrift Shop,” pee behind an alley dumpster, and now you’re crying on the phone with your high school boyfriend. After some regrettable drunk texting and a trip to the 24-hour Taco Bell, you’ll vomit in a hamper and pass out. In the morning, all you’ll have to show for yourself is a shattered iPhone screen and the sad realization that you’re an enormous douchebag.
4. The Campus Tour Guide
There’s something about a khaki and polo combination that turns even the most delightful of people into instant douchebags. From Best Buy employees to dads on the golf course, and every high school football coach in between, pleats and a tuck-in are guaranteed to turn otherwise pleasant people into total cornballs.
The campus tour guide pounds a four-pack of Red Bull and tries to sell the college experience with scripted saccharine and hackneyed punchlines. After some lame team building activities and a few made up stories about campus life, you’ll have a totally superficial idea of what it means to be a Spartan or a Wildcat or whatever strange animal is your prospective school’s mascot.
3. The One-and-Done Athlete
Your college got a blue chip prospect. Finally. While you brag insufferably about this being “state’s year!” this dude’s going to be fleecing boosters and running a foul of NCAA regulations. After sleeping his way through a semester’s worth of gen-ed’s, leading your school to a 4th place finish in the NIT, and subsequently hocking his game-worn sneakers on eBay, the NCAA’s Rule Committee is going to crater the program with crippling sanctions. While your school struggles to get back on its feet, this guy’s cashing a game check in the league and Instagram-ing his bottle service receipts. It makes us sick just writing about him.
2. The Badass T.A.
If you go to a large school, your professor will be too busy chasing grant money to be bothered with class. So you’ll end up at the mercy of a frenzied graduate student who takes attendance and grades on a curve. Look at this guy. You can see a 40% fail rate in his eyes. Any guy brazen enough to pull off those glasses is definitely assigning a term paper over Spring Break. This can’t be life.
1. The Born-Again Rager (a.k.a. The Lightweight)
There’s something to be said for getting your sea legs in high school. If one goes into college with 18 year’s worth of 8 p.m. curfews and nightly breathalyzers from their overbearing parents, all it takes is a few unsupervised nights in the dorm to turn the captain of the math team into a teenage version of David Lee Roth. This guy beer bongs and promptly projectile vomits his parents tuition money away. He texts every girl in his phone “What r u up 2?” at 1 a.m. nightly and brags about “getting totally wasted last night” like it’s a unique accomplishment. After failing his first set of finals, he’ll have to enroll in a community college near home and trade in his drunken, late night Chipotle runs for Sunday afternoon grocery trips to Costco with mom. We’d feel bad if it weren’t so funny.