Don’t worry, Mom and Dad, your $40,000-a-year tuition bill is being well spent. Here at Georgetown, I have been learning valuable academic and life lessons:

Dorm Life 101

1. Sneak food out of the cafeteria – if your meal plan works out to $10 a plate, you might as well get the biggest bang for your buck. Hint on this lesson: the huge cargo pockets on your guy friend’s pants are the perfect place to hide an extra sandwich or two – it seems that ridiculous fashion trend does have some practicality to it.

2. It is possible shave your legs in a Porta-Potty-size shower stall without touching the mold-infested walls.

3. Get the most out of your laundry load – if the washer looks like it might explode, it’s OK to throw in just a few more articles of clothing

4. The snooze button on alarms clocks infringe severely on attendance at 8:15 classes

5. Snooze buttons should be wired with electric zap buttons so you can be one of the few at that 8:15 class. Oh, and the best place for your alarm is right under your pillow – try ignoring that.

6. Girls living in big numbers tend to breed bitchiness. Gossip suddenly becomes exponentially more vicious and dirty looks fly like bullets.

7. Learn to sleep through all the typical girl beauty noises. If you can’t sleep through the noise of hair dryers, straighteners, and curling irons going full blast at 7 a.m., you’re not gonna make it.

8. The best time to study in a dorm is Saturday and Sunday mornings. The “activities” of Friday and Saturday nights often render the floor completely incapacitated until 1 or 2 p.m. These two mornings will be the only silent hours you ever have in a college dorm.

Classroom Etiquette

1. Never sit in the front row. The people who sit in the front row are not the ones who will receive the A, win the Nobel Prize, or be the future leaders of the New World. They are the brown-nose, blood-thirsty A-seekers who think that the closer they sit to the professor and the more often they raise their hands, the more likely they are to get the top grade. They’d be sitting on the prof’s lap if they could. Trust me, your seat is not some sort of Calvinistic predestination thing for your grade.

2. Raise your hand and say your two cents’ worth at the beginning of class, when you are still fresh and enthusiastic about the subject. This way, you make one of the first good impressions on the teacher, and you can sit back and relax the rest of class without feeling like you haven’t contributed.

3. Don’t laugh at those who ask 20 stupid questions every class. Yes, they are making the human race look less intelligent than mollusks, but they are also using lots of class time that the teacher might otherwise use to impose more learning on you.

Living on a Low Budget

The key to keeping a low budget in an insanely expensive neighborhood is knowing where to shop and translating the confusing commercial language of the area shops.

1. Grocery shopping: Learn to like grocery stores that incorporate tacky neon colors into their color-scheme. These stores look and are cheap. Anything with more aesthetically pleasing decor, and you should expect to see signs like “$5 per grape” instead of “$5 per pound.” Also avoid places that use gourmet, fresh or organic in their signs. College student is analogous to beggar in the phrase “beggars can’t be choosers.”

2. Also concerning food: Look for and become a frequent visitor to any campus activities that advertise “FREE FOOD.” Who cares if you’re a Democrat, no one needs to know that as you eat pizza with the local Republican Society. Politics and integrity have never gone together anyway. Also, if any teacher/friends’ parent offers to take you to dinner, eat like you aren’t going to eat again for a week. Noncafeteria food paid for by others should only be devoured in this fashion

3. Clothes Shopping: This is perhaps one of the biggest monetary threats to parents, especially with girls. However, I have quickly learned where to stop and where to pass by. Enter every clothing store in Georgetown with extreme caution. Before admiring anything, approach the nearest article of clothing and look at its price tag. If that wicked cute pair of jeans costs as much as your text book bill, make a quick and graceful exit from the store, avoiding eye contact with any sales clerk. Note of caution: During my first experience with this lesson, I made the mistake of gasping with wide eyes upon looking at the price of those wicked cute jeans. Make such a gross faux pas and next thing you know, the sales ladies may be lynching you with a designer belt.

5. The Foreign Names Rule: Any business with a foreign-sounding name, whether authentic or grossly Americanized, should be off limits. The name may be Spanish, Italian, French or any fake version of these, but whatever it is, they all directly translate to this: expensive. So whether shopping or looking to just get a haircut, think Americantrically. Or consider letting that crazy New Yorker down the hall cut your hair for free – just ignore that rule “you get what you pay for.” And make buddies with the gal who looks like she’s the same size as you – double your wardrobe for free!

After reading this, you can fully appreciate where your money is going. Oh yeah, and I learned a little about the Protestant Reformation, the principles of thermochemistry, the use of the passe simple in French literature and the Limit Definition of the Derivative. But, honestly, how important are these topics when you consider how much I have learned from the collegiate microcosm of life?

Brianne Steele, a graduate of Bangor High School, is a freshman at Georgetown University.