What’s Hot
Course hoodies
If you’re a Fresher then let me tell you, this is the coolest piece of clothing you’ll ever wear in your college career. Forget what older students say about wearing a course hoodie with a genius slogan, your pulling power has just skyrocketed. Maybe even wear it to DTwo or Coppers once you’re old enough to finally get in, as it’s a guaranteed way to attract fellow first years. Who wouldn’t shift someone wearing a poor-quality hoodie in a shade of keen green that says ‘Simply the BESS’ or ‘Ooh Law Law’?
A great way to demonstrate the high calibre of your degree choice to a potential partner and indicate the ease with which you can obtain a graduate job in one of the Big Five, live in a tiny apartment costing €7000 per month and reminisce on the good old college days. When you’re feeling sad, wear your old course hoodie to the office and be met with looks of approval for the clever wit that went into the pun that is inked in large white script on your back. The best €25 you’ll ever spend.
Trinity Ball (before they release the line-up)
As people finish midterms before Christmas, it can remind them of looming exams in less than six months time. And what comes just before summer exams? The long awaited Trinity Ball, highlight of the college social calendar and every student’s last chance to get outrageously ruined in a night that spans the most unsociable of hours. Europe’s largest private party is a night that is looked forward to each year until it reaches February and the actual line-up is released. On that day, our hopes are dashed again and again as the announcement is live-streamed from an exclusive house party for only the coolest of the cool, and the whispered rumours that Kanye West and Garth Brooks are doing a B2B in the dance tent at 1am come crashing down onto the Prazsky-ridden living room floor. This is when everyone remembers that it’s Trinity Ents running the show, and our hopes and dreams that it would finally be the year for T Ball to live up to the hype are broken once more. Until then, cherish the next three months of naive anticipation.
Becoming a DJ
It seems like everyone’s flatmate, granny and dog are claiming they’re a DJ after they mix a few tunes on some shoddy decks they found from the man selling six Dairy Milks for a tenner and Chinese cigarettes on Moore Street. It’s never been easier to DJ in Trinity, so why not try it yourself? Having become as popular as brushing your teeth in the morning, DUDJ’s memberships have actually risen by 112% in the past three months alone.
The record for the number of student-ran nights in Dublin has also been surpassed. If you don’t run a night out with a pun for a title, do you even go to Trinity? You tell your friends that actually, it’s actually more than just techno, because you’ve found some really cool, unheard of tracks that you’re going to play in your kitchen at an upcoming gaff. All your friends will think it’s the best thing ever, not because your mixing skills are anything special, but because the concoction of Class A’s that they’re taking make car alarms rave-worthy.
What’s Not
Repeal Jumpers
Whether a genuine pro-choice supporter or a bandwagon-jumper, it’s finally time to retire last year’s hottest Arts Block staple. You’ve ensured that all of campus are aware of your social activist, Trinity-esque, liberal views by sporting the black and white jumper for the past year. You’re cool, you’re hip, you’re ready to fight (for)the (wo)man.
But, as time passed, the initial looks of admiration and awe from your fellow classmates that affirmed your position as a passionate campaigner for bodily autonomy began to wane and you asked yourself if there was any point in carrying on if people don’t compliment your behaviour as a champion of choice. There’s not. Please, just take it off.
Southeast Asia/ Canada
As the nights draw in and we begin to dream of sizzling summer nights fuelled by cocktails on the beach, the question begins to crop up during library breaks as to what our youthful selves should do with our summers this year. Suggest Southeast Asia or Canada to your group of peers, and expect to be met with glares of disgust. I’d like to know if you lived under a rock all of summer, as half of the country flocked to the above destinations. Why stay at home and go out with all the people you know, when you could do it for ten times the price surrounded by the odd palm tree or the thirteenth Irish person to ask to share your couch in downtown Vancouver?
Whilst it was great to live in poverty and come home two grand into your overdraft, it was undoubtedly last year’s fad. It’s time to find a new exotic, undiscovered land off the continent to do exactly the same things we do at home: working and drinking.
Smoking rollies outside the Arts Block
We’ve been over this. Our dear friend, father-figure and overall God-to-whom-we-must-bow-before, Provost Paddy P, declared that Trinity would have smoke-free zones from July 2016. This includes the beloved rollie retreat of the Arts Block benches, whereupon stressed students would puff their problems away. All our Provost cares for is our health, and whilst the zones have been implemented, stubborn students haven’t listened and continue to obnoxiously impart chemicals into the fresh, Trinity air and the faces of eager American tourists queueing for the Book of Kells. Only those who have lost their grip on reality and any smidge of self-control they had, brought about by impending deadlines and the stress of college life, will continuously ingest their rollies like they’re the elixir of life, contrary to the plans of our Provost who hoped to see his students eating an apple and maybe discussing some readings at the benches instead. He’s definitely right, of course. Smokers are jokers.