If you’ve ever joined any club, sport, school, or summer camp, or something along those lines, in your life, then you know that there are unspoken rules and assumed knowledge involved with all of these. The only problem is that when you first join, you have absolutely no idea about any of these.

There are rites of passage, experiences you have to go through in order to truly understand how to play the game. Mercyhurst is not an exception to any of this, and you may find that there are things you wish you had known would happen before coming here.

One of the biggest things that will bond you with other students during freshman year is going to be complaining about and making fun of various situations. Disturbances such as the music blaring outside of your dorm window while the lacrosse, football, soccer, players practice at 9 a.m. in the morning would have been good to know about. Not to mention the new bells that ring hourly every day to remind us to wake up for class on Saturdays and how, universally throughout the campus, all of the washing machines are extremely unreliable. The machines will break down, they will be unavailable, they will steal your socks. No power in the universe can prevent it from happening.

Regarding homework, students will always have it and will always hate it. It will take 20 minutes to write out one sentence sometimes. These are all things that would have been extremely nice to know, and maybe prepare for, before coming here.

Then there are the events that we simply cannot predict will happen. Having the Laker Inn turn into a swimming pool this past February is one of these cases. Another would be how fleeting our Laker Louie’s (may he rest in peace) life would be, thanks to his valiant attempts to save the Laker from 3 inches of water (although I have my suspicions of his demise being a total “accident”). There were also those two days out of the four days in all of ’Hurst history that classes were canceled.

But there are good things that we wish we had known we would do, if just to prepare ourselves or plan ahead of time, such as midnight dance parties or sleepovers in each other’s rooms or in the common area of the floor in your dorm and rearranging furniture to do so, going to the C-store even if you don’t live in Warde and buying the over-priced ice cream and sushi… Stealing couches and putting them in your dorm room for more sitting space for friends to hang out on, and bunking beds for more convenience and space in your room. Making friends with your RAs and loving the little parties and events they set up for you.

There are tons of things we wish we had known about living at the ’Hurst and theories we can come up with to explain them. They make us a community. Sometimes a cynical one, but I love it.