Stepping out of the Mount Holyoke bubble every now and then is refreshing. I have friends at other schools all over the Northeast, as I’m sure many of you do as well, and I visit them whenever I can. Spending a week at a massive state school in the South, however, is a different story. I visited my sister Taylor at the University of Alabama over October break; here are some of the biggest differences between MHC and ‘Bama I had to adjust to during my time there-
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Greek Life
Many of us have been to frat parties at UMass, the only one of the Five Colleges that officially provides them. Greek life in the South is a completely different animal. While UMass Greek houses mostly resemble oversized versions of the average suburban New England home, ‘Bama houses are white-pillared, brick mansions. These massive buildings dominate a lot of the similarly beautiful campus, and unlike many of the trashed-out, mysteriously sticky frat houses I’ve been to in the past, these spaces are actually liveable. Rumor has it that one of the sororities even has a live-in barista. According to the school’s website, roughly one-third of the undergrad student body is involved in Greek Life. Even if you’re not a member, you’ll have to get your Phi Mu’s and Delta Gamma’s straight in order to get by.
2. Football culture
At other schools you can usually get by with just passive knowledge about football; games I’ve been to are mostly social events for watching your drunk, over-pregamed peers make idiots of themselves. But down there in Tuscaloosa, the stadium was packed with 100,000 fans decked out in red and black-and-white houndstooth, screaming at the players while my friend next to me was still walking me through the rules of the game. Part of the hype was that my visit coincided with Homecoming Weekend, where the school holds a parade and crowns a sorority member as Homecoming Queen. Even during the off-season, the football team’s coach, Nick Saban, is worshipped like a god. When I asked my sister who he was, she looked around fearfully hoping that no one had heard my verbal faux pas. If you go to a football game in the South, dress the part, know the rules, and prepare for some real vocal damage.
3. The People
(I didn’t take pictures of random strangers in Alabama like some creep, so here’s a puppy I met down there named Miss Piggy.)
There were plenty of things I witnessed that I hadn’t expected from Alabama, but this completely threw me: everyone here looks the same. The school is overwhelmingly white, and it felt like every girl I saw on game day had long brown or blonde hair, either straightened or gently curled, and either a mid-length maroon dress and cowboy boots or skinny jeans and strappy sandals. On class days, they wore high buns and oversized t-shirts; (my sister explained that this look was called a “shaggy”). Think of the preppiest Amherst boy you’ve ever seen and put him in a polo emblazoned with a scarlet letter A and you’ve got most of the Alabama boys covered.
However, I’ll absolutely give them this: Southern hospitality is absolutely real. I’m from New Jersey, where passive aggression and polite indifference is a way of life. I’d been warned that Southern folk would be over-the-top nice. I had trouble leaving convenience stores on multiple occasions because the cashier would rope me into a conversation while I tried my hardest to end it and leave. And I may have been imagining things at this point, but I certainly felt a big difference between my chatty, helpful, Southern flight attendants on my trip back from Birmingham to a layover in Washington, D.C., and the Northern ones who wanted us all to get on and off the plane with no fuss in between.
If you ever get the chance, take a grand leap out of your comfort zone and explore somewhere you’ve never been. You might discover a magical land where gas is under $2 and the chicken wings are divine!