First, welcome to Wake Forest! At this point you either completely love Wake and can’t stop telling your friends from home how much fun it is, or you haven’t fallen in love with it yet but tell all your friends you’re having the time of your life anyway. Regardless, this is hands down the most exciting time you’ll have at Wake (until you come back as a sophomore and find out what real fun is).
Unfortunately, the first few weeks are also those in which you have to be the most careful about the reputation that you make for yourself around campus. Apart from the classic worries about risking losing a bid to your favorite sorority, which are typically petty and tend not to matter in the long run, freshmen girls need to consider the impact their actions have on the average upperclassman male (and, to some extent, sophomore).
An upperclassman guy is extremely different from any freshmen guy on your hall (who you’ll inevitably deem yourself cooler than until spring semester) because upperclassmen don’t want to waste time checking into every rumor they hear. As a result, any name that you make for yourself as a freshman girl will be absorbed and believed by every older guy who hears about it, and any negatives associated with it will not be forgotten easily.
Now, that isn’t to say that rumors can’t go away or be disproved, and it’s certainly possible to change your reputation around campus. That being said, consider the fairly small size of Wake’s campus, which will seem to keep shrinking the older you get. Now assume that whatever social scene you’re a part of is much smaller than Wake as a whole. See my point?
Reputations are harder to shake than you might think. Consider the case of “poop girl,” whose one disastrous night (I doubt I need to explain what happened) resulted in her retaining that title multiple years later. There are tons of those stories, and an infinite number of extremely creative nicknames, that can really ruin your first few years at Wake. And I can promise you this, there is nothing more entertaining for an upperclassman than to sit around and hear stories like this, and freshmen guys love the attention they get for passing on these stories.
So if your heart is set on doing something worthy of a nickname at some point during your college career, I recommend you at least wait until you are no longer a freshman. Because at that point you will have an established friend group that will (hopefully) overlook your debauchery, and the guys your age will no longer be pathetically groveling at the feet of every cool upperclassman in the hopes of impressing them with a cool story.