Untangling the cookie-cutter party culture amongst undergraduate students
You’ve spent the week working hard at school: getting up for early morning classes, completing the readings, and handing assignments in—all of which involve getting yourself organized amidst the chaos of a university workload. It’s Friday night; it’s the time for hard-working students to get out of the classroom and into the club, have fun, and let loose. It’s 9 pm, and you are sitting on your bed, eating the rest of your take-out chicken biryani that you picked up somewhere on the way home after studying, and you’re watching the latest episode of Riverdale on Netflix. You are alone.
Your roommates are having some pre-party fun outside your bedroom door. The Spotify party playlist making everyone “drop it like it’s hot” is blasting as they share mixed drinks made from tall and overpriced bottles of Smirnoff and pump themselves up before venturing into a night of fun. If they’re going out with a party-hard enthusiastic #YOLO attitude, then why are you alone? It’s a Friday night and you are on your bed with no plans wondering: “Is this okay? Why the hell am I not getting ready to party right now, too?”
While you may not have a problem with being alone, staying in can augment feelings of inadequacy, making you feel unwanted and kind of like a loser. These are thoughts that many have experienced or will experience during their undergraduate career. You don’t have to subscribe to the “life of the party” vibe, but this doesn’t stop students who don’t from feeling excluded. The character of the “partying undergrad” exists as an archetype projected onto students who can feel pressured to conform to this image.
Students enter the university social scene assuming that university will be the best years of their lives. They envision their undergraduate experience as one that will fit those picture-perfect Instagram moments where everyone makes a bunch of friends, shares unforgettable memories, and peaks in their character development and self-understanding—all while taking shots of vodka. The image of the “ultimate university experience” that has been implanted in our heads finds its roots in media representations. From 22 Jump Street to The House Bunny, mass media projects typical scenes of the university night-out experience, consisting of close friends partying together in a club under bright strobe lights and a pumping speaker system. As Janis Ian put it in Mean Girls, the expectation is to “drink awesome shooters, listen to awesome music, and then just sit around and soak up each other’s awesomeness.”
“It’s definitely something that is heavily portrayed in media as the true uni experience,” says Lee, a third-year life sciences student at UofT.
“So many university-themed movies are about this. It’s always a ‘wild party, rager’ of a good time. So I feel like there is that pressure to go out and party and stuff that comes from the media that embeds itself in our culture in general,” Lee notes. In this sense, parties become synonymous with the university experience, existing as a checkpoint that one is expected to pass in order to complete their university identity.
The livelihood and relevance of these picture-perfect moments are frequently portrayed in movies and social media, which, as a result, can create ripple effects of anxiety amongst students who don’t plan on hitting up the party scene every weekend. The need to fit in with the “it” crowd and blend in naturally with the party culture that exists amongst undergraduate university students “is another stress that a university student really doesn’t need,” notes Lee. “There’s a separation from who you are and what you think you should be and that becomes extremely stressful.” The “because-that’s-what-everyone-else-is-doing” discourse that many of us experience as a justification for participating in university party culture becomes a way to rationalize it by making the heavy assumption that if we do not take part in the party scene we will become socially isolated. Partying then becomes the last resort to building friendships. We participate out of the fear that not partaking in such activities will leave us ostracized from the larger community of students.
Is this how it is meant to be? Are we expected to fulfill this image of the ideal and “popular” university student with a booming weekend social life? And if we are, how do we do it? The truth is, everyone is going to live their university lives differently. You may be the student that spends a Friday night going out with a big group of friends to a club and partying through the night, or you may be the student that sits alone on a weekend night, taking time to just lounge around. Jamie, a third-year engineering student, expresses how he navigates party culture: “If it’s not me, it’s not me. I shouldn’t force myself to do it just because most others are doing it, or else I’m just going to feel miserable,” he notes.
But what if you crave that sense of belonging and social-scene behaviour that you believe will serve as the cookie-cutter undergraduate experience? The media’s depiction of university as a party-central environment is replicated in some of your friends’ Instagram or Snapchat stories, but not in yours. You may sit there, like me, scrolling through your phone and viewing these images, and feel excluded, as if you were missing out on what the true undergraduate experience is meant to be. You may be wondering, “Should I become a part of that scene? Should I be out there having the time of my life?”
“You gotta try to take your focus off of that scene and realize that there is more out there—ot just partying. Realize that you don’t enjoy it, don’t lie to yourself, and find things that you can enjoy regardless of the company,” Jamie says.
It becomes easy for students to fall into the “party trap,” where they get sucked into believing that in order to make the most out of undergraduate life, they must partake in the “go hard or go home” mentality, leaving those who deviate from this with fewer options to fit in.
“Everyone else is always doing that, so you feel that that’s what you should be doing. We’re at that point in our lives where we feel like we need to fit into the group and do what the group is doing,” says Lee.
At this age, we’re going to hear a lot of people say “find your people,” reassuring us that nothing lasts forever and that everything will fall into place. The truth is that this does eventually happen. “The spectrum of humanity is so diverse,” notes Lee, meaning that even if we may feel like we need to restrict ourselves to one group for whatever reason, we lose sight of the fact that there are a lot of people out there. In this sense, when we think about party cultures in universities generally, this tightly held mentality doesn’t have to be toxic.
“It’s only toxic if it’s unnatural and if you’re forcing yourself to be there,” says Jamie.
So here are my two cents:
Yes, we enter university with the expectation that we are going to have the time of our lives, that we are going to have the freedom to make our own decisions, our own mistakes, and gravitate towards the groups of people that we naturally come to belong to. We may expect our youthful selves to go to the wildest parties and make the craziest memories, maybe even some that we won’t fully recall the next day. But, if you’re not partying like your roommates into the early hours of a Saturday morning, if you don’t feel the need to drink some “awesome shooters” and go drop it like it’s hot with your galpals and posse of friends, then you’re not alone. If there’s anything that I have learned, it is that there shouldn’t be just one laminated manual for students on “How to be a University Student,” because everyone will experience their undergraduate years in their own way. However, we also need to acknowledge how the pressure to fit in and find a sense of community can be extremely stressful; it does get to us sometimes and can seem like the end of the world.
So, you’re alone on a Friday night. Remember that it is okay not to participate in party culture. Craft your own university experience. If you feel as though you’re living in the shadow of a character that you must turn into, it becomes brutally hard to step outside of that bubble and gain a true sense of self-awareness about where you belong in the midst of all this chaos.
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