Freshman

“ We can conceive of a college freshman attaining perfection in his class; yet the honors of the upper classman are beyond; and graduation, though to him remote, is assured if be do but maintain his high standing to the end. ”

“ Our academic home was simple in its appointments,—so simple that Joy-of-Life and I often merrily quoted to each other the comment of a calling freshman:
"When I'm old, I mean to have a dear little house just like this one, all furnished with nothing but books." ”

“ POPULARITY. In the college use, favor of one's classmates, or of the members of all the classes, generally. Nowhere is this term employed so often, and with so much significance, as among collegians. The first wish of the Freshman is to be popular, and the desire does not leave him during all his college life. ”

“ I'm only telling you kid stories, for you are still a good deal of a kid, though a pseudo-college man. You can draw morals from them or not as best meets your requirements. You know your requirements better than I do. You aren't so bad—in fact, you have behaved yourself pretty well—for a Freshman—better than I anticipated in some respects. But you still have a lot to learn about being a college man. So I am just telling you about college men and college kids I have known. ”

“ Don't let yourself be mesmerized into taking a lot of things you feel a positive disinclination for. Many a Freshman has spoiled his first year in this way; and, failing to pass, has left College and become a street-car conductor or a clerk. ”

“ I remember to have heard of the son of a somewhat conspicuous gentleman who had desired to give his children the benefit of an education such as Yale affords, who had spent four years there; but the entire four years were spent as a member of the Freshman class. [Laughter.] What a fortunate condition to be continually towering over more and more of those who are competing with him in scholarship and for distinction! I know of none greater unless some mode might be discovered by which one could be a Senior for four years. There is nothing in human affairs that could equal that happiness! ”

“ A [Pg 63] new class is always somewhat hysterical. Some of those in the front rows turned and stared at him in their laughter.
It was a natural mistake. This freshman had prepared for college at a high school, and most of the High School teachers were women. Young should have joined in the laughter, but he only stood there, scarlet and serious-looking and wishing he could disappear forever. ”

“ At Cambridge and eke at Oxford, every stripling is accounted a Man from the moment of his putting on the gown and cap.—Gradus ad Cantab., p. 75.
Sweet are the slumbers, indeed, of a Freshman, who, just escaped the trammels of "home, sweet home," and the pedagogue's tyrannical birch, for the first time in his life, with the academical gown, assumes the toga virilis, and feels himself a Man.—Alma Mater, Vol. I. p. 30.
In College all are "men" from the hirsute Senior to the tender Freshman who carries off a pound of candy and paper of raisins from the maternal domicile weekly.—Harv. Mag., Vol. ”

“ After entering college the boy continues his studies in the philosophy of education under the tutelage of a sophomore. His tutor informs him that the object of education is the all-round man. The faculty and the curriculum, he explains, are obstacles, but the upper classes rescue the poor freshman from pentagonal and other primitive shapes and round him out with smokers, hazing, initiations, jamborees, and visits to the big city, where he makes the acquaintance of drinks and ladies far more brilliant-hued than those of his somber native town. ”

“ The junior is ever ready to give him a good deal of solid advice, and a great deal more ready to get the freshman to do errands for him, and all manner of odd jobs that the freshman is quite sure to do, until, as the boys say, he tumbles to the fact that after all the junior is really making game of him. ”

“ The freshman has not been long a member of the University before the daily curriculum becomes familiar to him. He is quick to learn that the buttery of his college sends every morning to his rooms an allowance of milk, and bread and butter, ample for the needs of the common day. ”

“ He's from a large prep. school near by, and has learned a great many things about college life, a course which is not taught by the masters or laid down in the curriculum. He is an athlete and a promising career for him is already outlined, in theory, but look out! A little prominence is a dangerous thing. In Freshman year a man's position is given to him by his reputation; in Senior year he takes his proper place with his character. What a man seems to be cuts lots of ice at first; but what he really is wins out at the finish.
Ah, here is an upper-classman—of a certain sort. ”

“ When we say that our freshman, like other freshmen, "began" this course, we use the verb advisedly; for, like many other freshmen who start with a burst in learning's race, he soon got winded, and fell back among the ruck. But the course of lectures, like the course of true love, will not always run smooth, even to those who undertake it with the same courage as Mr. Verdant Green. ”

“ No Freshman shall call or throw anything across the College yard.
"20. No Freshman shall mingo against the College wall, nor go into the Fellows cus john. [30]
"21. Freshmen may ware there hats at dinner and supper, except when they go to receive there Commons of bread and bear.
"22. Freshmen are so to carry themselves to there Seniors in all respects so as to be in no wise saucy to them, and who soever of the Freshmen shall brake any of these customs shall be severely punished." ”

“ Felstedian, Dec., 178. The new trousers and immaculate brown boots of the “FRESHER” are suffering terribly from the slush.
1898. Stonyhurst Mag., Dec., p. 149, “Life at Oxford.” Three Seniors were entertaining some fifteen or more FRESHERS.
Adj. (University) .—Of, or pertaining to, a FRESHMAN, or a first year student.
Freshman’s Bible, subs. phr. (University) .—The University Calendar.
Freshman’s Church, subs. phr. (Cambridge) .—The Pitt Press. [From its ecclesiastical architecture.]
Freshman’s Landmark, subs. phr. (Cambridge) .—King’s College Chapel. [From the situation.] ”

“ On either side walked upper-classmen, some calmly smoking pipes as if there was nothing to be excited about, laughing lightly [Pg 31] and making remarks. The way they looked at Young and his companions reminded him of his father and the other farmers judging live stock at the county fair.
"Pretty good looking Freshman class, Harry," said one fellow whose face Young couldn't see in the dark.
"Um," said the one addressed, nodding. "There's a fellow, looks——" Young lost the rest of it. ”

“ Yet there is a law in the high school superior to that of the teacher. At the dictates of a gong, classes arise in the face of a teacher’s incompleted peroration and depart. As for the pupils, there is no rest for the soles of their feet; a freshman in the high school is a mere abecedarian part of an ever-moving line, which toils, weighted with pounds of text-books, up and down the stairways of knowledge, climbing to the mansard heights for rhetoric, to descend, 228past doors to which it must later return, to the foundation floor for Ancient History. ”

“ To be at the head, or 'to head the roll,' is an object of ambition, while 'to foot the roll' is anything but desirable."
MIDDLE BACHELOR. One who is in his second year after taking the degree of Bachelor of Arts.
A Senior Sophister has authority to take a Freshman from a
Sophomore, a Middle Bachelor from a Junior Sophister.—Quincy's
Hist. Harv. Univ., Vol. II. p. 540.
MIGRATE. In the English universities, to remove from one college to another.
One of the unsuccessful candidates migrated.—Bristed's Five
Years in an Eng. Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 100. ”

“ And it is just at this critical time that college life steps in to his aid. With his new life a new light bursts upon his mind; he finds that he is not the little household-god he had fancied himself to be ”

“ Leaders in the stirring world of to-day return at each commencement to share the fresh life of the new class. Books, pictures, music, collections, appliances in every field, learned teachers, mirthful friends, athletics for holidays, the best words of the best men for holy days,—all are here. No wonder that men look back upon their college life as upon halcyon days, the romantic period of youth. ”

“ Once upon a time a certain old graduate found himself in the midst of a beautiful college campus. On all sides he beheld old beloved scenes and well-remembered landmarks; but also he discovered new haunts, new places, unfamiliar and somehow unwelcome to him. And about him, as he stood there gazing, came and went many of the same recognizable types of lovable undergraduate humanity; and yet here in the crowd strolled one sort and over there across the way stood another sort that seemed strange and unexpected. ”

“ Many of these parents, whose hard-working lives have always spelled duty, choose each year to beat their way against rigid economy, penury, and bitter loss, that their sons may possess what they themselves never had, a college education. And [9-11] when we have found, below all his boyish pranks, dissimulations, and masqueradings, the true undergraduate, we may also discern some of the pervasive influences which are to-day shaping life upon this Western Continent; for the undergraduate is a true glass to give back to the nation its own image. ”

“ Aside from the curriculum, what is the atmosphere that a boy breathes as soon as he sets foot on a college campus? Is he trained in honesty, in politeness, in high ideals of speech, in lofty conceptions of character? Does he have to obey orders? Is he taught to be neat, prompt, and industrious? Such questions are of things too often taken for granted, and too often lacking. ”

“ The college year has begun, and at its end the young man will vault over the bars;, and, pointing his diploma at the world, will shout, "Hold up your hands." But, alas, the world will not stand and deliver for a volley of sheepskins. ”

“ In college mind meets mind in the severe competition of recitation and annual examination. The bright boy—one of a small class at home, who had it all his own way there—now finds a score or more of leaders whose unvoiced challenge he is compelled to accept, and how he does knit his brow, close his eyes, summon his strength, school his will, force his flagging energies, and grapple problems that he may hold his own, outstrip his rivals, and win prize and place for the sake of his family’s fame and for his personal satisfaction! ”

“ Yet in spite of this I have sometimes thought that in college more than elsewhere the old law holds, "To him that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance, but from him who hath not shall be taken away even that which he seemeth to have." For it is the young life which is open and prepared to receive which obtains the gracious and uplifting influences of college days. What, then, for such persons are the rich and abiding rewards of study in college or university? ”

“ That will depend on yourself. When you have finished the fourth grade, you will go to the High School, and they will become workingmen; but you will remain in the same city for many years, perhaps. Why, then, will you never meet again? When you are in the University of the Lyceum, you will seek them out in their shops or their workrooms, and it will be a great pleasure for you to meet the companions of your youth once more, as men at work. ”

“ I have heard of a man who had one foot in the grave, but here was a man who had one foot in heaven. Dear friend, and my father's friend, friend of my youth, and all my later years, teacher, counselor, encourager, model of my student life, to whom my heart was knit in all the ardor of the first enthusiasm over the idea of going to college, to whom my obligations are beyond computation, Thou hast thyself gone to sit at the feet of the Great Teacher. ”

“ Taking a survey of all the college men I know, and have known, I cannot be sure that the addition of a college education makes much difference in the end. The man who succeeds with a college degree would have succeeded without it. It is personality that counts. Character rules the world, be it educated at college or in the gutter.
I passed into my second year in the following spring, and then in turn from sophomore to third year without distinction, without disgrace or notable incident. I learned to smoke and began to shave, and believed myself to be a thoroughly sophisticated youth. ”

“ Heroes and scholars have gone forth from their studies here, into the great field of the world, to seek their fortunes, and to conquer and be conquered. As I surveyed the exterior of the different Colleges, I could here and there see the reflection of the light from the window of some student, who was busy at his studies, or throwing away his time over some trashy novel, too many of which find their way into the trunks or carpet bags of the young men on setting out for College. ”

“ For some students, too, we must conclude that trivialities and immoralities bury far out of sight the true meaning of college training and life-work; but in other students, and these are the majority, underneath his curriculum and his customs, his light-heartedness, his loves, and his seeming listlessness, one may discern the real American undergraduate, energetic, earnest, expectant, and strenuously eager for those great campaigns of his day and generation in which the priceless guerdon is the “joy of the working.” ”