Jesse Reynolds
Contributing Writer, Print Journalism
While all of her friends are getting hammered on the weekends, a female Keene State College senior, 22, from New Hampshire, refrains from drinking, but still goes out most nights.
“I like going out, like I’m not going to not go out with my friends,” she said. “Everybody else goes out so I’m not just gonna stay home alone.”
While she remains sober, she said she has witnessed people doing things that they would be horrified to know about after the fact.
“I don’t know if this is still true, but for a while one of my friends was banned from Cumby’s between certain hours at night because she would get wasted and steal food,” she said.
She described one instance before her friend was banned.
“There was one night that she had just hooked up with this kid and she shows up at Cumby’s in all boys clothes and she’s swaying trying to stand,” she said. “She put food in her pants and walked out with it, then she opened it in the parking lot and it went all over the place and she started eating it off the ground in the parking lot.”
Another time she was at a party and one of her friends disappeared for 20 minutes. Turns out, her friend was in the bathroom giving oral sex to some guy for a beer.
Despite all the horror stories, this senior said she has witnessed most of her friends mature as they’ve progressed through their KSC careers. “Most of them, once we all turned twenty-one especially, calmed down a lot,” she said, “Maybe it’s because we usually go to the bars and we have to spend more money to drink.”
She said as seniors they need to be more responsible and not drink all weekend, because they have jobs and school work.
Even after the Pumpkin Fest riots raised questions about the drinking culture surrounding KSC students, she said she thinks the current underclassmen aren’t any worse drinking-wise than her class was a few years ago.
“I don’t really know that many freshmen and sophomores, but I haven’t heard that many outrageous stories that are different from stuff we used to do when we were younger,” she said. In her opinion, KSC isn’t much different than a majority of universities in the United States.
“Pumpkin Fest was an unfortunate happening and many of the students didn’t go to Keene, so that shouldn’t reflect on all the students or the culture here,” she said.
“I don’t think Keene is much different than any other school when it comes to drinking.” She said it’s not so much the drinking culture in colleges that is the problem, but the drinking culture among high schools.
“In high school, especially, kids are drinking a lot more. When I was in high school we never really drank that much and I lived in a college town. I think people are starting a lot younger now, so they come to college with this expectation to get more [expletive] up than they did in high school,” she said.
“All you can really do is try to teach kids right from wrong, but sometimes you have to learn from making mistakes.”
