A new school year inevitably means new students. These freshmen fill the gap that graduating seniors leave behind and serve many purposes such as new people to flirt with, make fun of, recruit into clubs and ultimately, make friends with.
But it can be difficult to figure out who is a new face on campus and who is an upperclassman whom you just happened to have never seen before. In order to avoid the horrific faux-pas of asking someone over the age of eighteen if they are a freshman, an anthropological study of the freshman "species" can be very helpful.
The easiest way to spot a freshman is that their faces are foreign to you. However, as mentioned above, this is not always a sure-fire solution. In addition, after a few weeks on campus, they will all start to look familiar to you, therefore making this method of dubious reliability.
There is an almost exclusively freshman phenomenon (although this is sometimes broken by sorority girls and sports teams) of group travel. We've all seen it. Freshman tend to travel in packs, especially when off campus. When asked the rationale behind this, most freshmen seemed to believe they do it for one of two reasons: to feel secure, since the college terrain is still somewhat new to a wandering freshman, and to feel, bluntly, cool. The more people you walk with at one time, the more friends you must have, right? Upperclassmen, while enjoying the benefits of several friends, tend to more often travel with only one to a few of said friends at any given moment. As the year trudges on, however, freshmen tend to gain a little more independence and no longer feel awkward walking to The Charles Street Market alone, thus making the pack mentality method nil after first semester.
This brings up another significant way to determine the freshmen from the upperclassmen: location. There are some places that are intrinsically freshman. For instance, you don't often see people beyond their freshman year hanging out on the Freshman Quad or in the AMRs unless they have a meeting or group-specific event held in these locations. Same goes for FFC. Although some athletes may frequent Fresh Food due to its proximity to the gym, FFC is primarily freshman territory. It's their species' watering hole. Freshmen are also more likely to be found at frat parties, especially early in the year, and are even more likely to attend more than one frat party in a single night. Speculation is that this is due to their preconceptions about college party life, as well as their lower work loads, but whatever the case, freshmen are much more likely to go out. Upperclassmen, on the other hand, although they may attend frat parties from time to time, are more likely to be found in someone's house or apartment with a smaller group of friends and, let's say, wine and rum rather than "Natty Bo."
Ultimately, scouting out freshmen isn't too difficult. Most of them want to be known!
