Markup View

Author: MartyD82

May 18th 2012 at 1:17:40 PM

Exactly. I realize there are a few instances where this trope may be TruthInTelevision (as there are for many similar tropes on this site), but in general, college and high school are much more disparate than a lot of television and movie writers make them seem. Actually, from my experience, there's a pretty large shift in maturity when you transition from Sophomore to Junior year of high school (probably because that's when students really start thinking about doing well on their SAT's/ACT's and getting into a good college, at which they realize how petty a lot of "teen angst issues" really are). Also, while I DID encounter one or two jocks in college that looked down on you if you were a little nerdy/awkward, they didn't have the power/grip that they would've had in a "traditional" high school setting. They were basically nobodies that you rarely (if ever) saw again after one semester. And, in my case, one of them was a girl who clearly had a lot of emotional problems (another high school/college difference: in college, you start to empathize more with the jerks/bullies you used to deal with and see what made them the way they were).

As for fraternities, at my university, fraternities were actually very specialized and esoteric. There was no "hottest fraternity that everybody wanted to join" or anything like that (from what I've seen, most other universities don't have that either, despite what movies like Animal House would have you think). It was more like: If you were into engineering, you could join the Engineering Fraternity. If you were into community service, you joined Alpha Phi Omega (the community service fraternity). And so on. Also, a lot of the people who are actually IN fraternities and sororities will tell you they're much more stressful and commitment-heavy than you'd think. In other words, there's a lot more to them than just nightly keg parties and TP'ing the rival fraternity's house.