I go to a party school but I don’t drink

On a typical weekend, given that I am not yet 21 and don’t have a fake I.D., I usually find myself in the middle of a dark, crowded room surrounded by sweaty, (mostly underage) inebriated individuals at one of the good, old-fashioned frat parties on 28th Street.

USC is widely perceived to have the perfect balance of a “work-hard-play-hard” mentality, and therefore it’s automatically assumed that most of the student body, especially those in Greek life and similar organizations, spend a good amount of their time under the influence of alcohol. While this is pretty common, it’s not true for all of us.

I, for one, am a 19-year old girl, I’m in a sorority, I go out at least once a week and I don’t drink. While I’m clearly in the minority, it’s actually a lot easier than you’d expect to stay sober at a so-called “party school.”

You could say my contribution to my roommates’ bottle collection has been quite “bounty”-ful (thank you, I’ll show myself out now).

I’ve never felt any sort of desire to get drunk. I credit my parents for this: any attempt to shock or anger them by asking for sips of their wine or beer at dinner was always met with “sure, go ahead and try it if you want, but you won’t like it.” Being the little brat that I was, I would always take an above-average-sized gulp, immediately gag at the taste and sprint to the kitchen sink to spit out the noxious liquid that had just invaded my senses (I did this on multiple different occasions too, so clearly I was slightly stupid in addition to bratty).

My parents neither encouraged me to, nor prohibited me from drinking, so I never saw alcohol as a means of rebellion and I think that’s why I never started drinking in high school. Of course now I just think that drunk people look/act really, really dumb, which is a look that I have absolutely no desire to copy. So I suppose the main reason I don’t drink is pretty simple: I just really don’t want to (I also don’t like the taste of alcohol, soda, or fruit juice, but that’s just a technicality).

Literally never without a water bottle in hand

When I first came to college, I was extremely worried about how not drinking would affect my undergraduate experience, particularly when it came to making new friends. I was reluctant to admit it to people at first, and would often carry around red cups at parties so that I wouldn’t stand out (these usually got knocked out of my hand at some point, and I lost several shirts to stubborn wine stains that refused to come out).

Eventually, both because I got tired of holding cups for hours on end and because I started running out of shirts, I stopped doing this and just started telling people that I didn’t drink if they asked why I didn’t have a cup in my hand. And you know what I discovered?

Practically no one cared that I didn’t drink (and the people who did, I quickly realized, were not worth my time), and that’s still true.

What are the usual reactions I encounter when confessing this, you may ask? My personal favorite response is when someone shrugs, says “Oh good, more for us,” and immediately downs whatever drink they’re holding at that moment. Most commonly, however, the person asking will just say something like “Really? Wow, that’s cool, I respect that.”

That’s usually the end of it, but sometimes if they want to make things difficult they’ll try to ask me to explain why (for those of you who think a frat party is a great time to ask this question definitely keep it up, it’s super fun trying to come up with a 5-second blurb of an answer to yell in your ear over the deafening music when you’re clearly not even that interested). I find that if you just stare at the person for long enough they’ll get unnerved and walk away, and you don’t have to answer them.

My typical pre-game activity.

So to sum up, no, you don’t need to drink alcohol to have fun in college if you don’t want to. If you choose not to drink, don’t worry about people judging you: that annoying saying your parents always told you, the “If they care they’re not your real friends” one still applies here in college. I won’t say that I’ve never felt pressured to drink from time to time, but it’s never been an issue I couldn’t handle.

Parties are still fun because drunk people are much less judgmental so you can basically do whatever you want, and even pre-games can be somewhat enjoyable since you can always just order pizza. The only thing that I can’t get behind while sober is tailgates: I’m sorry, but standing outside in the sun for hours on end, surrounded by people who are (hopefully) taking the “it’s a marathon not a sprint” advice as tantamount to a holy command will ever be redeemable in my eyes. And of course I’ve never been to a club or bar so I can’t have an opinion on them yet, but if you give me just a short year and 3 months I’ll get back to you on this as soon as I turn 21.