How to finish the fourth year fifth based on who you are
Because who reads T Sully’s emails anyway?
This Saturday arguably marks the most ratchet, unofficial UVA holiday of the year – the Fourth Year Fifth.
How, you may ask, am I going to kill an entire fifth of alcohol in the small amount of time I have before I pass out?
It depends, as everything else at UVA does, on who you are.
Frat bro
Get more creative than just chugging. Play a super long game of No Face or pour vodka in your breakfast cereal.
Find a new party trick by mastering the art of flipping a shot glass off your snapback hat and into your mouth.
Sorority girl
Find a really, really, really cute flask to carry around all day, with a saying like, “God made us best friends because he couldn’t handle us as sisters! <3”
Take a sip for every chapter you’ve attended this semester. Then every date function. Then philanthropy. Then mixer. Then miscellaneous recruitment meeting. There, done!
Don’t forget to Snapchat your tear-stained, mascara-streaked face at the end of the night (or the middle of the day) as you attempt to puke and rally.
Utterly uninvolved person
Congratulations for having the whole day to drink because you have nothing to do while drunk today or hungover tomorrow.
See if you can put a little effort into something, just this once. Make a punch. Attempt jello shots. You need some bullshit thing to put on your resume besides “Attendee of UVA Graduation.”
Someone who works on Sunday
If you’re anything like me and have the pleasure of working Sunday morning brunch on The Corner, you need to at least be functional enough to deliver Bloody Maries without throwing up.
Wake up at 4am for the drinking marathon to ensure your hangover will be slightly less deathly by Sunday morning. Drunk cook breakfast for your roommates, but make sure you spike their coffee.
RA
You have spent the entire year telling your residents not to do EXACTLY what you are about to. So you have to try to finish the fifth as subtly as possible.
Carry around a tiny flask, sip from it after checking to make sure no one is around, and continually ask your friends if you “seem drunk”.
Once all your residents are at the game, just chug it and hope you make it back alive.
The actual football fan
Since you don’t want to be completely blackout for the game, but want to make sure to partake in the tradition, get up at 5am and start taking a shot every hour.
While the prospect of taking shots at 5am might seem gruesome, it seems even worse to miss UVA running it up the middle.
The drinking society member
A fifth kill? What the fuck is this, high school? Go ahead and buy a liter, you overachiever. You don’t have a “strategy,” per se. Your strategy is to drink whatever is put in front of you. Maybe take a knee while you chug your liquor of choice (because let’s be real, you definitely have a liquor of choice).
You’ve got something to prove. You know it. Your drinking society colleagues know it. Your parents don’t know it, though, because your one “achievement” in college is something you can’t tell your parents without them worrying about your early onset alcoholism.
But whatever, you have alcohol, and that’s all that matters.
The non-partier
Even though you don’t drink that often, you still want to partake in the UVA tradition. Since you feel like you might actually die if you finish the fifth, get a group of friends together and split the fifth between you. The more friends, the better chance of someone holding your hair as you vomit the contents of your stomach.
Not only will you have “finished the fifth” you will have created a bond that can never be broken – an alcohol based one.
The hipster
Considering you couldn’t get ahold of a fifth of absinthe in time for the game, you’ve decided to stick up your nose at this UVA tradition – because traditions are emblematic of our society’s classist roots, and you will have nothing to do with that.
You opted for a bottle of three buck chuck and a documentary on your parents’ Netflix account about consumer culture.
Peer health educator*
Because you are a sane human who has been duly trained in the effects of alcohol and are probably more sensible than everyone around you, you’ll have a few drinks that do not add up to a fifth, get a nice buzz, and remember the game.
Sunday will be way more fun for you, and you will not have embarrassed yourself in public by throwing up on the hill or passing out in a stadium bathroom.
*Everyone should probably follow their lead. Stay safe, Hoos!