We at The Chronicle know that many sophomores will fall victim this year to the so-called “sophomore slump,” the general dimming of spirits that accompanies the end of freshman year and the need to begin planning one’s college career in full. In light of this phenomenon, we have put together this brief guide on how you yourself can overcome and avoid the supposed malaise of sophomore year.
1: Flee West Campus as you would Death himself.
Dirty, wet and full of cockroaches, West is not so much a campus as the geographical equivalent of a corpse discovered in a swamp – though granted, for this metaphor to work it must be an exquisitely dressed corpse, visited from far and wide for the beauty of its bloated, boggy carcass. Central is a distant, barren archipelago, plagued by bandits and impossible to reach but by a bus that makes its passage by Earth only once every hundred years. Faced with living in these places, it is no surprise that sophomores often end up feeling down. The best way to overcome this tristesse is to reject the notion of living off East Campus altogether and instead roam East each night seeking out empty beds in which to take shelter for the night. By doing this, one can successfully insulate oneself from the horrors that come with maturing.
2: Refuse to speak to anyone whom you did not meet during freshman year.
The proper thing to do sophomore year is to refuse to interact with anyone that you did not already know from freshman year. This includes unknown professors and Duke dining staff, who are alien to your freshman year and therefore risk compromising your perfect college experience. If a professor does call on you in class and says something to the effect of “I swear to God, Philip, if you don’t answer this time I’m going to kick you out of my class,” you may respond by screaming the requisite answer at the nearest person you did meet freshman year.
3: Eliminate the illusion of choice from your meal plan.
Many rising sophomores are excited by the prospect of finally being able to eat at a range of dining venues instead of having to go to Marketplace every day. What they do not realize, however, is that in losing Marketplace they are losing the kind of community that eating the same thing at the same venue with the same people day after day for a year can bring. This can be deeply saddening. The solution to this problem is to draft an accord with as many of your friends as possible agreeing that you will only ever eat at one venue. This may seem like a major sacrifice. West Campus has a wide range of dining options in much the same way that Donald Trump has a wide range of insightful thoughts to offer on the Latino community or a hot poker to the eyeball inspires a wide range of pleasant and calming emotions. Yet you will find that by voluntarily restricting the number of places you eat you shall perfectly preserve that joyous freshman camaraderie that would be otherwise unavailable to you as a sophomore.
4: Ensure for your own safety that you continue to wear your lanyard at all times.
It is a popular and important fact that the occurrence of the sophomore slump correlates uncannily to the decreased use of lanyards. Lanyards are of course an important guarantor of safety on Duke’s campus because they protect against attack by ceiling crocodiles. Ceiling crocodiles, which were introduced to Duke in 1921 and are known to breed in the spaces above dorm ceiling tiles, are famously afraid of lanyards. Stories abound of arrogant sophomores killed at night for failing to sleep with their lanyards. In one well-known instance, a sophomore couple was decapitated mid-coitus by a crocodile hanging upside-down from the ceiling because they forgot to wear a lanyard during sex. Most juniors, eventually wising to the dangerous narcissism of their sophomore years, end up eating their lanyards so as to provide ongoing protection once and for all.
5: Accept the emptiness of life and that, no matter how well you do in class or after college, ultimately your achievements will be wiped from the Earth like sandcastles from the beach and all that matters is your own enjoyment of your brief existence.
The sophomore slump ultimately arises out of an anxiety over the future; over what major one should do, what career one should angle for, which people one should be friends with, et cetera. Of course, in reality none of that will matter because one day everything you or I do will fall out of human memory. Entropy will rake the universe into uniformity, our physical footprints will disappear and it will be as though we never were. So none of that career stuff matters! Sure, try and get a good job and all so you can live comfortably, but for goodness’ sake, prioritize enjoying yourself over all that. That is after all the point of “being” in the first place.
In spite of the above, after death, Monday Monday’s soul plans to roam the empty universe forever, weeping softly to itself and giving depressing life advice to lingering muons.
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