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5 Creative Ways to Respond to Your Family Members at Thanksgiving When They Ask “How’s College Going?”

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  1. “I’m the co-president of X club!” Just replace X with the name of any former president and talk about how you initiate campus-wide discussions on hot-button issues. Make it sound super impressive to hide the fact that all the real clubs rejected you.
  2. “Everything is very calm and peaceful on campus right now—there are no tensions between students and admin!” You want to avoid Grandpa’s rant about how “college indoctrinates the youth into socialism” and “liberals get mad at everything”. If you express disappointment with any authority figure, you’re guaranteed to be called an anarcho-communist before the end of dinner. Consider yourself lucky if no one in your family mentions the video from Prezbo’s class.
  3. “I have tons of friends!” Make sure to go into really specific detail about a recent conversation you had and strategically omit the fact that it was with a stranger standing next to you in the JJ’s line on a Sunday night when it was the only dining hall open. Panicked? Here are some ideas for the “real friends” that you’ve made so far: 
    • Randy
      • He lives across the hall from you and you hang out every day! Best buds! He is cool and older and has awesome sophomore friends! Definitely not your RA! 
    • Allison
      • She always sits next to you in LitHum… and probably not just because of the assigned seating, right? One time, she even asked to borrow a pen. Granted, she didn’t remember your name, but still… 
    • Cal
      • They were in your NSOP group, and you actually have their phone number saved under the contact “Cal Barnard”. These days, they ignore you in the dorm elevator, but they probably still remember you too…
  4. “I’m getting straight A’s!” I mean, a D+ is pretty much a B+ and a B+ is pretty much an A- which is technically an A, right? Right??
  5. “Yeah, I have a pretty great internship lined up for the spring. But I might keep working with some of the networking I’ve already done, too.” They don’t need to know that you’ve gotten six rejection emails in the span of a month, or that the “networking” is signing people in at Dodge Fitness Center. 
  6. “I love my physics class!” You want to distract your dad from your English/film/theater/music/gender studies major, so make sure to focus extra hard on that Thinking Quantitatively requirement.
Thanksgiving Issue, November 2021