How do frat parties work?
As far as I know, everyone agrees that they suck. But week after week, there’s sure to be a crowd gathered for questionable jungle juice and maybe half of a White Claw (if you’re lucky). It seems to be a decades-long question with no definite answer, kind of like when you ask an Engineering student what they do.
A lot of people say they want to go to maybe one frat party “just for the experience”. I think in order to dissect this topic, some more specific questions need to be asked.
What exactly is the experience?
Just to reiterate, I’ve never really spoken to someone who thinks frat parties are super fun. Not even my friends in Greek life think the parties are very fun. It seems that we’re all on the same page that they’re a breeding ground for a plethora of unnamed and yet-to-be-studied sicknesses. I mean, as I write this, there is literally an inexplicable sickness taking over college students in America called the “Frat Flu”. If that’s not enough of a reason to question frat parties, I don’t know what is. To get back to the point, I’m not exactly sure what “the experience” is supposed to entail. Maybe I’ve just associated experiences worth having as just that — worth having. I get why people consider skydiving or swimming with sharks activities that are worth doing for “the experience”, but how much correlation really is there between those two events and frat parties? Aside from being scary?
If most of us agree that it’s a bad experience, why is going to a frat party an experience worth having?
Going back to the skydiving/swimming with sharks example, I think that most people (who lived to tell the tale afterwards) have said the experience was super cool. I personally do not know anyone who has said that after going to a frat party. But even after being told by friends and peers that the frat parties they went to sucked, college students continue to go! I have noticed that a lot of times, it comes down to not wanting to stay in on Friday night or just being bored and wanting to go out. Aside from that though, I’ve also come across people who spend all week excited to go to a frat party, even though they already know exactly what to expect.
Why is the experience so important to college life in America?
My sister goes to a small private college, while I attend a big state school known for crazy Greek life. She always asks if we can go to a frat party together whenever she comes to visit me at school. I always remind her that they do suck, but she feels like she missed out on having party fun in college because she doesn’t have frat parties to go to at her school. I’ve also heard that the American college system is known for Greek life around the world, though I obviously can’t attest to the validity of that statement. Maybe because I do have the opportunity to go to a frat party at my big state school whenever I want, I just view the whole concept differently.
Ultimately, I know the sanctity of frat parties will likely never be challenged. I don’t know that I even want to question the pedestal that frat parties are held on, but as always I’m curious to hear other opinions.
Signed,
Your everyday college kid who is just trying her best
