Life > September 1, 2005

By Dave Chace

Managing Editor

Take a look around our award-winning campus, freshmen.  Someday, all of this will be yours — and when that time comes, I need to feel comfortable that it is in the hands of individuals who will carry on a very sacred tradition — that of being The Best.  And I’m not just saying that you need to be the best that you can be, or that you should accomplish all of your goals to the best of your own abilities — you simply need to be The Best. 

By the time you are seniors at this prestigious institution, you need to know that no matter what, you are better than anybody else who is doing anything else with their lives. 

This is the reason you came here, young scholars. If there wasn’t already a Wake Forest Kid lurking somewhere within your soul, then you would be at a state school with all of your high school friends, drinking nine times a week while still pulling a B+ average. 

But you’re here, which means that despite all of the challenges you may face over the years — be they academic, physical, social or alcoholic in nature you will always be the supreme champion of your own little world.

I promise you that the upperclassmen will do everything necessary to turn you into a certified Wake Forest Kid before their time is up.  In three short years, you will be molded into the perfect specimen. 

You will be as stuck-up and shallow as the university’s drainage system. 

Your ego will spike higher than the tip of Wait Chapel. 

Your sense of personal vanity will become as outlandishly decorated with pearl necklaces and Croakies as campus has become landscaped with miniature rain forests.

As you develop the same case of small-campus cabin fever that has plagued every class before you, you will quickly discover that, there’s more to being a Wake Forest Kid than just owning a car worth more than a year’s tuition and whipping out Daddy’s credit card every time J. Crew comes out with another silly-looking pair of pants. 

Being a Wake Forest Kid is about speaking to anyone who attends a state school — your girlfriend included — like they’re five years old. 

Girls, it’s about slapping a pound of makeup on your face before heading off to the Miller Center to read a magazine while sitting on an exercise bike for 15 minutes, while the guys walk around you in their frat t-shirts pretending to work out while really just taking the opportunity to stare at themselves in the full-length mirrors. 

The Wake Forest Kid is the one complaining about having to pay an outrageous seven dollars per all-you-can-eat meal as they buy $200 worth of university merchandise and Vineyard Vines apparel from the Deacon Shop every semester. 

The Wake Forest Kid is the drunken slob on Pledge Night seeking out the sorority pledges dressed most like hookers and sticking their tongue down their throats — and then complaining the next Monday that the only thing Student Health can do about their newly-developed herpes of the mouth is offer a cup of “Magic Mouthwash” and a complimentary flavored condom.

Yes, Wake Forest Kids know that whatever treatment they’re getting, they deserve better.

And if you choose not to embrace this lifestyle?  Let’s say that for whatever misconstrued reasons, you came to this school to break out of the traditional Wake Forest mold and Be Your Own Man. 

Let’s say that you’re fully prepared to fight the pastel-shaded social norms, developed and perfected through a history of elitism, by showing the world that you will not let yourself get sucked into our way of life. 

Well, let’s just say that you’ll lose. 

Spike up that mohawk, blare emo punk rock from your iPod headphones and spray-paint as many Pok