<p>wait a sec. so is the major staple drug weed? is there like less amt of other drugs? because i know weed isnt so bad;</p>
<p>agreed. went for three and a half years w/o so much as a contact high, then went a little "crazy" spring of senior year (i.e., shared a toke two or three times.) Only heard rumors of other drugs.</p>
<p>@flyingpig: listen to madjoy. i don't have firsthand experience with substance-free living; ze has.</p>
<p>my perspective may be distorted by the fact that i lived in westco frosh and sophomore years. the advice i could give you would be to avoid that dorm and live in all-freshmen housing, where you'll be much less likely to find people who use substances to an unhealthy extent and where there'll be a larger variety of other, more wholesome entertainments by means of which to amuse oneself.</p>
<p>kids in westco use substances. some of them, including a good number of my friends, have problems with abusing those substances. this doesn't make them ****ty human beings but it does make them difficult to relate to, and i'm saying this as someone who's never been substance free. substance use, at least in that dorm among the people i know, is an integral part of the social experience. </p>
<p>that said i actually do know several (not one, not two, but several) people within westco who WERE utterly substance free, at least throughout freshman year. so it's do-able. it just means your friend group will probably end up being outside the dorm. or not; anyway i should restrict my advice to my personal experience and not try to hypothesize. </p>
<p>i credit the pervasive drug use among my friend group with impacting my social experience in a major way. i'm not going to go into it but i'll just say having so many heavy drug users for friends ruined a lot of things for me socially. the drug use wasn't all bad but a good deal of it was. as for the people i know in westco, the vast majority use substances regularly. so stay away from it; that's my advice. </p>
<p>what should you do about wesleyan? i don't mean to scare you away. i simply intended to offer you a bit of my own personal trove of experiences in order to allow you to make an informed decision on whether you want to spend 4 years here or not. so much of what goes on in this discussion forum is 100% positive about wesleyan. i tell you: there are good and bad aspects to the school, just as there are to every other one in the country and world. don't let either side carry you away until you've thoroughly considered the available data. caveat emptor, and good luck choosing</p>
<p>MrPimpateer - I was in Westco for three years (admittedly, a long time ago, when there were more upperclassmen) and was virtually substance free the entire time, unless of course, you define alcohol as a substance. I think the caveat here is that even though a majority of Westco people did weed and a few other psychedelics, those people were not part of my social circle. Don't get me wrong; we sat in each other's rooms and shot the breeze, we attended the same parties, I learned how to politely pass a joint without collapsing the spittle tip. </p>
<p>But, by and large, the people I went to movies with, went on trips with amd stayed in touch with the longest after we graduated were substance free to the same extent I was. In all honesty, there were probably only six of of us. But, it didn't stop me from being elected President of West College one year (and, may have been one reason why I was.) </p>
<p>Was I impacted socially or educationally? It probably skewed my sense of what was the norm at Wesleyan as a whole. And, to this day, I am constantly surprised when I go to reunions by how many people I did NOT know at Wesleyan at the time. But, I'm sure that happens to everybody.</p>
<p>In short, I think it depends a lot on who you are, who you were before you arrived at Wesleyan and who you plan to be afterward.</p>
<p>There were only six people in the whole school who were substance free?!! Or only six in that dorm?</p>
<p>Also: Someone had advised me NOT to pick a freshman-only hall because those are usually loud and "whoohoocollegenoparents". How are freshman-only halls more for sub-free people??</p>
<p>This thread is scaring me -- I think I'll request to live in sub-free.</p>
<p>in the olden days (like five or six years ago) westco had a rep as a more hippie-like dorm than others, and because of that rep drew a larger concentration of freshmen of that ilk. the substance-free crowd usually didn't congregate there. it makes sense that in those days there were only a handful of westco kids who did neither pot nor alcohol. these days, freshmen can't specify which specific dorm they want (just "freshman only" or "mixed"). the result is that it feels to me like the various types on campus (studious nerds, hipsters, jocks, straight-edge, card players, etc. and so on) are more mixed around rather than concentrated in one dorm or another. the good thing about that is no one feels out of place on their floor.</p>
<p>flying_pig319 - noooo. just talking about Westco. prefrosh is correct; Westco was self-selecting in those days.</p>
<p>yo it isn't now?!?</p>
<p>lol flying_pig... really, don't worry about finding subst free people. it really isn't hard to find them regardless of the dorm you'll be living in (perhaps with some exceptions...)
and madjoy you're right, i should've been more clear. each year you get a different 'atmosphere' of RA's (and students of course) and this year turned out so that fauver was actually a pretty tame dorm compared to others. from what i hear and read, clark seems to be the craziest this year (most hospitalizations... supposedly class of '12 has the most ever? there was an article on the argus).
i had a feeling that around 4-5 weeks after orientation, the 'woohoocollegenoparents' mentality kind of died down and (hopefully) most people learned their limits after some bad, bad nights. </p>
<p>ps you pre-frosh should read the argus (The</a> Wesleyan Argus) and wesleying (Wesleying</a>) if you aren't already.</p>
<p>Westco is still pretty self-selecting, given you have to apply and those that get to decide are usually part of a long line of hippies/hipsters.</p>
<p>Let me just say, you do not want to live in sub free housing. Wherever you live (well, maybe not WestCo) you can easily avoid drugs/alcohol if you don't want to be involved in that. There's no need to isolate yourself in the corner of Butt C (which is actually a pretty nice dorm, and I live there currently) do find other means of entertainment.</p>
<p>As for housing, I'd recommend getting a single in the Butts. It's far from Usdan, but the rooms are large and the whole thing is relatively quiet.</p>
<p>Cool, thanks.
Just curious: Why should I stay away from sub-free?</p>
<p>There's nothing wrong with sub-free. But, it's a bubble within a bubble. If you opt for it now you'll never know what your true tolerance level is for other ppl's nonesense. You may surprise yourself.</p>
<p>i don't intend to continue this discussion (in fact, let's NOT), but i know that cc threads get viewed by people searching on google and stuff, so i wanted to add this piece of information to anyone who may be reading:</p>
<p>i received a private message from a wesleyan student as this thread was going on, and it read,</p>
<p>"I know that some of the people posting in the Wes + Drugs thread give wes a very druggie image, but I wanted to let you know that my experience has been anything but that. I'd say 95% of the people I know are drug-free. It's all about the crowd you surround yourself with. I was in a non-sub free dorm, but I never came across drugs..."</p>
<p>so there you go. i also never saw any drugs or anything during my visit (not that i was looking). so it really depends on the person and i think the tiny random sample of people we got on this thread probably weren't very representative of the wesleyan student body.</p>
<p>I guess I'll just weigh in on this kind of late to say that in my group of friends, no one even smokes weed more often than maybe once a year or so. And I've had exactly zero issues with drug-using friends. It completely depends on what sort of scene you get yourself into, and obviously that's something you choose for yourself. </p>
<p>I agree that you should avoid living in WestCo if you don't want to be in a drug-laden environment. For whatever reason, a lot of the people who are really into drugs congregate there. </p>
<p>And it's also very true that Wes is a completely live-and-let-live kind of place. No one will care if you do or don't do drugs, or really think anything of it. So relax.</p>