The powers that be allowed me out of the hospital and into the wild this Saturday.
With something like 38 hours free of clinical responsibilities—in a row! On a weekend!—I decided to make the most of it. I went to Tailgate.
As a medical student, I don’t just do things; I learn about things while doing them.
For instance, I would never just admit a patient with pneumonia to the hospital; instead, I admit him to the hospital while learning about pneumonia. Likewise, I would never just kill a mouse in the laboratory; rather, I kill mice while learning about the mouse’s genes.
The point, of course, is that I have a lot to learn and not a lot of time to do it, and so there really isn’t any time to waste. After all, by this time next year, I’ll be a doctor.
So when I say I went to Tailgate, I didn’t just go to Tailgate. I went to learn. And since I write this column mostly as a weekly monument to my own ego but also as a public service to the Duke community, I thought I’d share.
1. Despite what you may read on these very pages, dating at Duke is by no means dead. In three hours at Tailgate, I saw no fewer than eight couples making out. Let me be clear: When I say making out, I mean really going at it. Like, for an uncomfortably long time and with an uncomfortable amount of visible body fluids.
And even more striking, these couples just would not be stopped. Most of the couples were getting jostled by the furiously dancing crowd and were actively being soaked with beer. Even the fact that it was approximately 5,000 degrees in the Blue Zone could not stop these modern-day Pyramus and Thisbes. If the delicate flower of love can blossom in the Blue Zone, then the soil on the rest of campus must be fertile.
2. A plastic sandwich bag will adequately protect an iPhone from an unexpected (beer) shower. This advice may only come in handy for my classmates going into obstetrics.
3. Never let it be said that this new-fangled generation of youngsters played too many video games and forgot to learn perseverance. I saw one guy wearing a wizard hat and a cape with a whole bunch of beer cans taped together to make himself a wizarding staff. As I watched, he walked over to the bushes, put down his staff and proceeded to vomit maybe three or four times. Then he picked up his staff and jumped right back into the party.
As a member of the med school admissions committee, this is the type of resolve I look for when determining who has what it takes to succeed as a med student. Back in my (grandpa’s) day, they called that gumption.
4. The summer before my senior year, Towerview magazine (which I edited) ran a cover that foretold, in giant pink letters, “THE DEATH OF TAILGATE.” The cover story, cleverly headlined “The Fall of a Fall Tradition,” told of the administration’s attempts to shut down a pre-football party that focused too much on drinking and not enough on the football team. Four years later, it’s clear that story was totally wrong. (In Towerview, we also ran a story on Mike Posner, and now his single is No. 15—I’m looking at Top 100—on the Billboard chart, so we were occasionally not horribly wrong.)
Tailgate is alive and pretty much exactly the same as ever. If I weren’t such a crusty old man, it just might’ve warmed my heart.
Alex Fanaroff is a fourth-year medical student. His column runs every Wednesday.
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