When you are a freshman, you think it is unfair for your seniors to be mean to you. But when you become a senior, the tables turn and you stop believing it as a dishonest or immoral activity to have fun and make some jokes about the freshmen.
Playing mean with the freshman has become a kind of ritual in nearly all colleges. And this tradition can also be seen nearly all countries. Students from all over the globe have reported somewhat similar bully behavior from their seniors.
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Terminology
It is not clear when or why this ritual started. Before getting the answer to this, let’s find out the meaning of these widely used college terms.
FRESHMAN:
A first-year student in a college is said to be a freshman. This refers to both boys and girls who’ve just enrolled in the first year. These students are mostly between the ages of 18 to 19 and just recently cleared highschool so college is a totally new and different experience for them.
However, there are also older students who graduated from high school but didn’t go to college right away for one reason or the other.
SOPHOMORE:
The second-year student of a college is called sophomore. The typical age of a sophomore is 19 to 20 years. But just as with the case of freshmen, they could be way older.
One of the reasons could be that they didn’t get the required credit hours needed to proceed to the next level.
Sophomores get the opportunity to decide their residence. They can stay in the dorms or stay out of campus, renting, and living independently.
JUNIOR:
A junior is a third-year student who has completed the credit hours and completed the requirements to move to the next class. The minimum credit hour required to enroll in this class is 60 credit hours, however, different colleges have different qualifying criteria.
A junior is also called upperclassman, meaning someone who has already spent two years in college. The class and the work gets harder, and one needs to do more work to pass the required level.
The essential skill students learn in this class is teamwork as they tend to work a lot on group projects. Students learn how to collaborate and work with other people. This social collaboration will be beneficial in their professional life.
SENIOR
The higher classman or final year students are called seniors. They need to have completed 90 credit hours to get admission to this class. The age of students is very diverse in this class. There are several reasons for this age diversity but the most common being credit hours.
In the senior year, the students have to study and look for internship all at once. Career affairs and networking with employers helps the students have a clear picture of the working “world”.
Main Reasons
In all fairness, seniors are not the only students who are mean to freshmen. The sophomore students also take the active and visible part in playing dirty with first-year students along with seniors. There are no reasons for the seniors and juniors to be mean with the freshman. But once we have a complete understanding of the class structure, we can dig deep to find out the reasons.
Tradition:
Traditions don’t need proper logic or rationale, they have been alive longer than we have. And even though some traditions have lost their reason to exist, people still cherish them and make them part of their lives.
The mean behavior of seniors and juniors towards newcomers is also considered a tradition in colleges and universities. Some seniors feel the need to humiliate freshmen just because they too were humiliated. It is some sort of a vicious unending cycle that has ended up being a tradition.
Psychology:
Some of these mean behaviors are passed on from years of watching what others are doing. It becomes so ingrained that it almost feels okay and normal to do it too. The same applies to seniors bullying freshmen, it has been done for so long that freshmen almost expect it when they join college and seniors eagerly wait for their turn to be mean.
Sociology:
The society always builds on classes and ranks. And in college, there is a definite class distinction. The humiliation and mean behavior of seniors towards freshman is the act of making it clear to them what their place in the college is.
Conclusion
When seniors show mean behavior to the freshmen, they don’t have any particular reason to do so. Sometimes they do it for fun, and other times they do it because of the reasons mentioned above. There is no need for seniors to behave in this way, but that’s just how it goes.
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