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After receiving standout scores on her social placement exams last week, Elizabeth Mesler ’15 chose to forego the first three years of college friendships and begin her first year at Brown in a clique composed mainly of seniors.
Test administrator Julian Price said he believed Mesler was “more than ready” for the reminiscing-intensive extra curriculum of a senior social life.
“As a member of the friend group, [Mesler] will be permitted to complain that she is ‘not really into the whole college scene anymore’ as early as next semester, at which point she may also begin venting about the stress of finding a post-college job,” said Price.
“As with any senior-level friend group, she will be required to laugh at inside jokes whose origin and meaning nobody quite remembers,” he continued.
Mesler said she hopes the new coterie will be a step up from high school, where her unusual talent for making friends and maintaining relationships often caused her to feel isolated, unable to relate to her less socially advanced peers.
Producing a worn-down scrapbook from 2008, the required reading for her first week in the friend group, she perused photos taken in Emery Hall during her new senior friends’ first semester three years ago.
“They looked so young back then,” said Mesler, who is 18.
Upon overhearing another student asking for directions to the Brown Bookstore, Mesler shook her head and laughed knowingly. “I remember when I was just a wide-eyed and bushy-tailed freshman,” she said, “So eager to fit in, so nervous about those placement exams. God, it was so long ago!”
“Where exactly is the bookstore?” she added.
Mesler, who still enjoys alcohol, but doesn’t feel like she needs to go out and get plastered every night, said she plans to become a regular at the Grad Center Bar, “not even really to get drunk but just as a way to escape all the freshmen riffraff, you know?”
“I guess I just don’t get the appeal of going to shit-shows like Sex Power God and hooking up with total strangers when you already have the best friends in the whole world,” she said upon learning of the existence of the annual Queer Alliance party.
At press time, Mesler said she and the gang were considering staying up until morning and getting breakfast at Louis Family Restaurant “for old time’s sake.” It would be Mesler’s first trip to the Brook Street eatery.
