They warned me that this day would come. Freshman year was great. As a chick, I was in my prime. Everything was new and exciting, and freshman girls garner attention in nearly every situation, be it social, athletic, academic or otherwise.
It's the one time during your Tufts career when you realistically stand a chance of being TEMSed and living it down. The only thing more malleable than my shamelessly naive perception of reality was my GPA. I didn't give it much thought when I heard in passing that "no one likes a drunk sophomore," probably because I was new to college and the thought of spending a night puking was foreign and invigorating. Then one day, after my last final when I logged into SIS, there it was, in big capitalized print: SOPHOMORE.
So let's break it down. I feel like the notion of "attractiveness as a function of age dependent on gender" is a somewhat inherently accepted college phenomenon, but I'll summarize anyway. Grab your TIs because we're about to get down with some high math. Girls start off as supple young vixens, high on the attractiveness rating, relatively untainted by frat parties, the consequential lazy hangovers and the early-onset wrinkles from late nights in Club Tisch. These girls seemingly fade into irrelevance as the years pass — following the function y= -x + 4, if I may — getting a little less exciting with every passing Dewick encounter. Then one day you realize that your college pheromones have depleted completely and you and your male study partner actually just study.
For guys of course it's just the opposite. They've been on the rise, becoming progressively more desirable — following y=x on my ever-so poignant graph of the college years — since crash-landing in puberty. By senior year they can strut around with bad B.O. and a receding hairline. As long as they're wearing some Vineyard Vines and an aura of confident douche-baggery, some delusional chick will probably still get hot and heavy. If this concept still sounds incredibly foreign to you, you probably either live in Hill Hall or have some kind of wildly offensive rash that's keeping you in the dark.
Actually, back up. I'd like to offer an alternative to my original equation for the ladies' graph. I venture to take it one step further and say that after freshman year, the graph takes a rapid dive and then slowly tapers till graduation. When Tilton, Haskell, Hill and Houston fill with fresh prospects, other classes are old news. Before you know it, you're 22 and Match.com-ing some Tufts Medical School bro and running a statistical analysis on the likelihood that he'll still have at least 75 percent of his hair left by the time he gets a degree that actually accomplishes something. Your Facebook profile picture is from two years ago and you just got an invitation to your bestie's engagement party because the witty minx snagged a man when she was 18. Yikes.
And so it goes. I'm guessing somewhere around sophomore summer, when the playing field is somewhat even, I'll find a gem of a man to serenade me nightly until some class of 2016 hussy snatches him from my desperate loins around the second week of September. So these are my final words: Guys, you're on the rise. Sophomores and up: steal a class of 2015 shirt, wear some blush, and consider a snazzy, suggestive tattoo to add some curb appeal. And there's always grad school! Freshmen: the clock is ticking. 2016 ED1 apps are due Nov. 1, so enjoy it while you can.
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Chelsea Stevens is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major. She can be reached at Chelsea.Stevens@tufts.edu.
