Literally every single college student you’ll encounter in New York City

New York college students are the lifeblood of the city that never sleeps. Whether they’re lounging in the sun in Washington Square Park, having anxiety attacks about their workload in their Morningside Heights apartment, or bemoaning the crappy subway service that gets them to their commuter school at a snail’s pace, they are everywhere, paying ludicrous tuition and even crazier rent.

If you study in New York City, chances are you’ve shared a class with, thrown up over or woken up next to one of the following characters.

‘Actually I live in Brooklyn now’ guy

He leaves every social event inappropriately early, ensuring he leaves himself enough time to get the L to whatever godforsaken slum is covered by the umbrella term “East Williamsburg” these days. The rats outside HIS apartment are a slightly different color. Will want to sleep over when you bang him, and will try and get his arm like under you in the most awkward-for-you, comfortable-for-him way.

The vegan who can’t shut up about being vegan

You probably can’t be around this person for more than 10 minutes without them announcing they are vegan. They love to tell you that the cream cheese on their bagel is tofu, spend every afternoon at by CHLOE, and send you articles to scare you into never eating meat again. Enjoy your plant based crap.

The straight, normal, nice, not fuckboy dude at NYU

He does not exist.

The newfound virtuoso

Arrived as normal, quiet Chris from Iowa, is now Genesis, an actor/performer/artist with fourteen hair colors. Their final project involved drenching themselves in sheep’s blood and farting glitter onto a plain canvas, for which they were awarded an A.

The 85-year-old Hunter student doing his 12th degree

So cute!

The Soul Cycle girl

She goes to Soul Cycle every single day except Sunday, when she has a private 2-hour session at Gotham Gym (“I totally saw Gigi there one time, we have the same trainer!!”) before brunching at Jack’s Wife Freda. She lives in Lululemon leggings and subsists on 3-day juice cleanses from Liquiteria, and makes her boyfriend take photos of outfit whenever they go out, which she hashtags #nycgirl #eatclean #lovelife.

The NYU student who is so busy they refuse to communicate by message but only send you voice notes

You can hear them panting in the background talking about how they’re late, again.

The New York royalty student

There are two main categories of New York royalty student. Either they want you to think they’re better that you and will dress accordingly, layering on every kind of well known expensive brand. Or, they blend in with the rest of the student body.

If invited to one of their house parties, you’ll show up to an apartment the size of most people’s houses with a view of Central Park from either the East or West side. And you try to push out of your mind how much you pay for a glorified closet with a view of a brick wall.

The basic Instagram betch

“Do it for the Insta” is her motto. They religiously follow Instagram-worthy places and would wait an hour and a half to eat cookie dough in the freezing cold just for the Instagram. They also obsessively posts Instagrams everyday to show you that they do, in fact have a life. Once they have over 3,000 followers, they change their job title to “public figure” and description to “social media influencer, contact for collabs!! xoxo”.

The ‘New York made me’ student

You see pictures of them from high school and they were the girl/boy next door. Now they suddenly have an assortment of piercings (especially septum), wrist/leg tattoos. They have multi-colored or bleached hair with 1-2 inches of grow out. They shop exclusively at thrift stores, (or say they do when it’s really it’s probably Urban Outfitters) wearing mainly black layers with some kind of fur jacket/vest on top no matter how hot or cold it is.

You will never catch these NYC students at a Starbucks but rather hanging in the Lower East Side and Brooklyn at vegan, gluten-free art cafés and dive bars where bands that no one has ever heard of play.

The newly out gay guy

He’s from the Midwest or Deep South but has dreamed of moving to NYC ever since he saw how horrible Andi treated Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada. His Instagram is extra as fuck, always demanding that his friends “take a picture of me! Wait, can you do one more? OK, one more.” Going out with him is incredibly fun until he perceives an imaginary slight from some girl on the dance floor and starts screaming obscenities at her so you’re forced to drag him home. Oh, and his skin is way better than yours.

The ‘I’m busier than you’ person

They’re taking a full load of classes as well as an unpaid internship (like everyone else), but somehow they manage to act like their life as a college student in NYC has them on the brink of despair. They’re unavailable to do anything remotely relaxing thing ever, and if you invite them to brunch or to yoga, they respond with a feverish “I’m too busy” before launching into a 30 minute rant about how stressed they are.

If they ever do decide to grace you with their presence, the conversation you have over a coffee date (which can only last for exactly 37 minutes and 7 seconds) is entirely centered around them trying to compete with you. They “win” when they think they sound busier.

Example conversation:

Normal person: Hey, how have you been?

“Busier” person: I LITERALLY don’t have time for anything right now. I’ve been working on A, B, C, D, E.

Normal: Oh cool, I just started an internship too. I usually go Monday, Wednesday and Fridays.

“Busier” person: Oh yeah, well I do mine in office and from home so my work basically NEVER ends. You’re so lucky that you only have it three days per week. Must be easy.

The ‘connected’ guy

Theo wears an aviator jacket from a vintage jacket, has a floppy fringe that will segway into a topknot midway through junior year. He wants to sell you cocaine and finger you. Neither is as satisfying as initially promised.

The ‘my parents are rich as fuck and I want everyone to know it’ person

They wear Maison Margiela boots and have a different YSL wallet to match each Dries Van Noten overcoat. They’re 10 minutes late everyday to class, presumably because they’re jetlagged from flying to Iceland or Cabo every weekend to meet up with a friend for brunch. They get the new iPhone the second it’s available, and Uber everywhere. They only go to clubs with VIP lounges, and tag Highsnobiety in their Instagram posts.

The ‘artsier than thou’ girl

She smokes cigarettes and only listens to Spotify artists with less than 15,000 followers. She complains about gentrification while dishing out $2,000 a month for her LES studio, which is filled with potted ivy and miniature succulents. She goes to underground raves in Bushwick on Thursday nights and shows up to class the next day chugging La Colombe.

The excessive club goer

You can catch this student texting their sketchy ass promoter in class on a Thursday or in line for the clubs you’ve avoided since welcome week freshman year. He blows all his money on tables with bottles, while she texts her sketchy promoters to get in and mooch their table every weekend. You’ll see them both bombarding your Snapchat feed trying to tell you that the club is “lit”, when in reality it is a bunch of randos packed into a crappy bar and sounds like a nightmare.

The guy from Westchester

Everyone is from Westchester. Half of New York is from Westchester. You can distinguish this person from the excited, Lacoste-clad Connecticuter by their dark and moody persona, accented by a pretentious knowledge of Joyce, like a poet who’s just returned from an afternoon in the woods “contemplating life.”

The guy from New Jersey

If he’s not from Westchester, he’s from New Jersey.

The British person

He sounds like he’s straight out of Downton Abbey, which was cute in the beginning but has since gotten pretty old, especially since he ordered beans on top of his avocado toast at brunch. He goes to pubs and gets wasted every day at approximately 7pm, but even in a drunken stupor he somehow still manages to sound classier than you. He spells words like “apologise” with an ‘s’ even though it’s CLEARLY pronounced zzzzz. And despite being from England, he doesn’t even knowing Prince Harry. Why are we friends?

The pothead/plug

You constantly hit up this person for a weed connect, because let’s face it, they always have one. Never a minute where their eyes aren’t as red as the devil, or where they aren’t baked out of their mind in class, all while impressively maintaining an average GPA. They are strictly weed people, and their apartment looks and feels like a trap house. They are so ~chill~ that you feel cold.

The West Coast transplant

90 percent of them are from California and they will immediately let you know how much they’re missing the warmth. They don’t just mean the weather, but the warmth of the people who are polite and smile at you for no reason.

They can’t wrap their heads around why everyone in NYC is so angsty and bitter all the time. They talk about how they’re moving right back to Cali as soon as they graduate.

They’ll probably be seen wearing bohemian or surf style clothing in the summer, early autumn and spring but as soon as temperatures drop below 50 degrees they’re always wrapped up head to toe in gear not unlike what is worn in subzero conditions. If the temperature is below freezing, they won’t be seen at all since they’ll be cuddled up in 6 blankets back at their apartment.

The ‘anti-public-transportation-only-Uber’ girl

Sample quotes:

“My dad said he’d way rather pay for me to get a cab to be sure, so I linked my account to his card.”

“It’s so dirty though!”

“Isn’t the subway really unsafe?”

The wannabe Wall Street guy

For some reason, he thinks that majoring in Econ (with a minor in Business Management no less) and living in close proximity to the stock exchange will guarantee him a starting salary of $500k. He wears suits to class for no apparent reason, and spends the weekend distributing his 2-page resumé at various career fairs. Every internship he does is with a consulting company or a bank, and he looks down on people who are studying anything that’s less “employable.” He rotates between Adderall, Modafinil, and Vyvanse, with an extra kick of cocaine during finals. And chances are he will end up way richer than most of us.

The protester

She RSVPs to every single protest on Facebook and actually goes to all of them. Some of them she even livestreams, to the joy of 7 viewers. Her dorm room is cluttered with a half dozen cardboard signs that measure the progress of the last nine months, from #IMWITHHER, to #HANDSOFFMYPUSSY, to #NOTMYPRESIDENT. She wears her pink pussy hat everyday, and #BLACKLIVESMATTER or #GIRLBOSS T-shirts to class (and makes sure everyone sees them). She is the face of the Resistance.

The College Republican

He’s from Ohio where his dad owns a modestly successful car dealership. He grew up going to church every Sunday and mowing his neighbor’s lawn on the weekends. He wears button-downs and khakis. He’s not as ragingly right-wing as many of his southern college counterparts, but stirs the pot with statements like “affirmative action is just reverse racism” and “Trump didn’t mean all Mexicans.”

The ‘poet’ who thinks he’s Allen Ginsberg

He sulks around in tortoise-shell glasses and a knit pull-over/tweed blazer ensemble (“it’s vintage, I traded my shoes for it with a homeless guy in San Francisco), drinking fair-trade espressos and smoking organic American Spirits, prefacing every statement with “New York isn’t alive anymore. Creativity died in the 80s.” He detests social media and prefers to write his über-profound thoughts in a battered notebook, which he laters transfers to his Tumblr.

By Laura Casado, Roya Hegdahl, Perri Kressel, Matt McDonald, Amanda Ross and Harry Shukman.