Trinity College - Inside Scoop

School Slang

• Club “V,” or the Party Barn - Vernon Social Center.
• Mather - The main cafeteria on campus.

• The Long Walk - The walk along Seabury and Jarvis dorm connecting the North side of campus to the South side.
• The Lower Long Walk - The walk on the East side of the main quad connecting the Bistro to the library.

• The Sophomore Slums - Typically student-inhabited apartment buildings on Allen Place and Crescent Street.

Things I Wish I Knew Before Coming To School

• Although it’s going to be tough, don’t let your freshman year drag you down. Stick it out at least one more year, then see how you feel about Trin.
• Make sure to keep up on your fashion sense—many Trin students won’t hesitate to display their “model behavior.”

• The “work hard, play hard” mentality runs the gamut here.

• The local area is pretty bad. Don’t stray too far down Crescent Street. Muggings are frequent—college students are broke enough as it is—and some areas aren’t well lit.

Tips to Succeed

• Get involved with a club, fraternity, IM or varsity sport, or some other campus organization. It will help you meet people quicker, and campus organizations can serve as good stress relievers during finals or any other hectic time.
• Join a campus organization—you won’t regret it.

• Sleep, study, and shower!

• Take advantage of all that Hartford has to offer.

Traditions

• The Plaque on the Long Walk - There is a plaque on the Long Walk that commemorates a visit FDR made to Trinity in the 1930s. It contains a Latin inscription—each year there is a contest as to which student can translate it correctly (the translation is, by the way, “Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off”). FDR stood on that spot to make a speech, and the plaque was put in. The legend is that, if you walk on it, you will not graduate. However, if you do take a drunken stumble across it, or, in a bleary haze after pulling an all-nighter a friend pushes you across it, don’t fear! In your senior year, if you throw up on the plaque, then that reverses the curse . . . It is also said that if you have sex with a member of the senior class while standing on the plaque, the curse will be taken away. Perhaps there’s only one way for you to find out if any of it is true.