We all know the typical Hopkins student. He sits at a desk on D-level on a Friday night studying for an organic chemistry exam that's two weeks away, determined to set the curve. He never ventures far from the safe haven at 3400 N. Charles St., and his idea of fun is a biology lab.
But we also know that stereotype doesn't hold true for everyone, and it doesn't take a week of boozing on a Caribbean island to get some pre-meds, engineers and humanities students to go wild.
Here are a collection of stories straight from the Homewood campus, with names changed to protect the not-so-innocent:
Kristen was at a fraternity date party at a bar downtown. The open bar had lowered everyone's inhibitions, and sloppy couples were making out in every corner.
"I started pounding on the bar and screaming, `Someone buy me a drink!'" Kristen remembers. It didn't take long for someone to come to her rescue.
Drink in hand, Kristen made her way over to the DJ booth. "I asked him to play my favorite song, and he did."
Kristen was so excited that she grabbed her friend and decided to dance on top of some speakers.
Five security guards rushed over to the two girls and ordered them to get down immediately. "We did, and then I was like, `Well, if I can't dance with her, you dance with me.'"
One security guard grabbed her hand and led her to the dance floor, where the two got cozy for a few songs.
"He wasn't my date," Kristen recalls, "but he was a really good dancer."
Angela was attending a party thrown by some of her friends. They had music, a keg, and all the staples of a good party, but they were running a little low on cups. No cups meant no beer for partygoers.
Angela offered to go buy more cups. Figuring she would run somewhere nearby, her friends let her leave.
As soon as she stepped out of the house, Angela ran into some friends on the street. Completely forgetting about her quest for cups, she agreed to follow them to a fraternity.
At the frat, Angela was the only girl in a room full of guys drinking beer and making plans to go pick up some "to-hoes" (girls from Towson University). Angela had no interest in leaving Hopkins to find girls, but she somehow found herself in a cab with beefy frat boys speeding up N. Charles St. looking for some action.
The girls at Towson were just as expected, and Angela was bored. She left the party and hailed a cab back to campus.
When she was halfway there, she realized she had forgotten her wallet, and didn't have any money. Knowing her friends from the cup-less party would be worried about her (and probably wondering where the cups were), she told the cab driver to drop her off at Wolman Hall so she could quickly get cash and run back to the first party, cups in hand.
Angela made her way to the Wolman lobby's ATM while the cab driver sat idling outside waiting for his fare. Angela put her card in and tried to enter her pin number. But she couldn't remember it.
For a few minutes, she tried entering random numbers, but she wasn't getting it right. She started to panic; she had no way to pay the cab driver.
Not knowing what else to do, Angela ran into the lounge adjacent to the Wolman lobby. She hid under some couches until the cab driver eventually drove away. Then she made her way back to the party.
She never got the cups, but she did end up with a really good story.
Emily's friend invited her out to a lesbian bar one Saturday night. "As open-minded as I am, I didn't want to go," Emily explains. "I said no over and over and over again."
As the night wore on, Emily and another friend became more enthusiastic about the idea of going out. They were going to go to the Charles Village Pub, but when they got back to Emily's suite, her suitemates invited her to go to a different club. "I invited a few more friends, so there were six of us total," she says.
The first half of the group caught a cab downtown, but Emily and the others had trouble hailing one.
"Then a car of young guys drove by. I yelled out, `Pick us up!' and they stopped and reversed in the middle of the street."
The boys drove Emily and her friends to the club, and even stayed to party with the group. "It turned out nice because they were not sketchy at all, and didn't kidnap us," Emily adds.
When they got to the club, Emily headed into the bathroom, where she noticed that there were a lot of lesbian couples. She didn't think anything of it, but when she got back to the dance floor, she realized it was gay night at the club.
"I love the irony. I refused to go to a lesbian bar, but ended up going to one anyway."
