I’m sorry, Northwestern. This September, I visited my two best friends at their university, the State School, and I fear I may have done some irrevocable damage. Here is my formal apology, if I forever sullied the Northwestern name in the minds of the few students I met. The kid I shotgunned my first beer with seemed to take a shine to me, but perhaps in the sense one likes the mangy puppy at the local animal shelter. He watched proudly as the Keystone Light dribbled down my chin and looked as though he might turn to his roommate and ask, “Aww, can we keep her? Please?”

My experiences and musings on what I found to be stark discrepancies between my State School weekend and a life at Northwestern (shotgunning with strangers a case-in-point) are in no way commentary on the “Northwestern Student Body”. Despite the “Nerdwestern” shirts hanging in Beck’s, Evanston is home to some fairly socially well-adjusted individuals. I know Northwestern would have been much better represented by a Monday and Thursday night regular, one who knows the names and birthdays of both bouncers at the Deuce.

I consider myself somewhere in between, having been to the Deuce but never eaten the much-hyped free pizza. While I have drunk a Keg cup, I have only danced on the pole once, for irony’s sake. I also prided myself on never having vomited from drinking; my standby ace when playing Kings. Well, was my standby ace when playing Kings. Something I lost, along with my cell phone charger and temporarily the feeling in my lower jaw, to the State School.

I arrived at the airport on that Thursday to a cheery voice mail left by my best friend. “I’m on my way to the airport, see you at 11! Get your schwasted shoes on….” she said in a jingly voice. Fuck. Schwasted shoes? I knew I forgot something. Like an anal retentive fourteen-year-old, I’d remembered my retainer and travel-sized shampoo, but schwasted shoes I had definitely left behind. Especially given that I had spent my last three lonely weeks of summer soberly watching Top Chef reruns with my stepmom rather than training my liver for the four-day trial it was about to endure: the Iron Man Triathlon of drunkenness. But I had been previously warned of the impending debauchery. “You should definitely come Labor Day weekend,” she had told me in July. Not only was it a three-day weekend, Saturday was their biggest football game of the season. “It’s going to be a shit show,” she said, with what sounded like four extra t’s. As if only such diction could fully drive home just how drunk she intended to be. Shittttt. Show.

And shit show it was. Thursday afternoon was spent touring their gorgeously landscaped campus and downtown student district. Their town clearly had a lot to offer beyond tri-weekly keggers: hiking, biking, skiing and a vibrant arts and dining scene. Although I found their friends’ conversation inevitably strayed to one of three topics: how drunk they were last weekend, how drunk they planned on being this weekend or How I Met Your Mother.

After dinner and getting dressed, my friends and their roommates sat down at their living room coffee table to large cups of homemade jungle juice; just like grandma used to make. Their ritualistic approach to “getting schwasted” was completely foreign to me. My Northwestern drunken adventures usually started crammed with seven other people into a dorm room, sipping contraband Burnett’s and strawberry kiwi juice from the penguin mug I’d received for Christmas — for cocoa during all those cold Chicago winters, I’d been told. This was different. There were four of us, no looming CA’s, and CSI reruns were still playing in the background. “Well, what game should we play tonight?” they asked monotonously, as though this “pregame” was just an obligatory part of the getting ready process. At Northwestern, the pregame often became the game. But at the State School, they knew you had to stretch beforehand and take a warm-up lap around the field.

We left my friend’s apartment, myself admittedly sober, my friend admittedly not. Wary of anything made in Tupperware storage containers and containing Crystal Light, I had only consumed half a plastic tumbler of their house special. We made our way to the party, after meeting up with more friends who had taken part in the same obligatory small-scale Thursday night ritual. I realized quickly that earlier judgments aside, State School friends were just like my Northwestern ones. Friendly, buzzing with excitement and dropping the tired but always popular “that’s what she said.” Except they liked to drink. A lot. Even the State School friends I had considered a little more mild-mannered than the rest were surprisingly adamant about their vodka-saturated lifestyles. Maggie, a quiet girl from Ohio, had a telling calendar posted on her fridge. “Monday: Funday! Tuesday: boo. Wednesday: Almost there! Thursday, Friday, Saturday: Get Fucked Up!!!!” It was punctuated by a slew of bubbly exclamation points and read like a child’s birthday invitation. One where the party favors were colored erasers and butterfly clips, rather than a hangover.

After my aversion to the earlier offered jungle juice, I found comfort in a keg, a silo of 4.2 percent happiness. I spent the rest of the night playing pong and “gargoyling”. A State School alternate to the much-loved keg stand, “gargoyling” involves squatting atop the keg, hose in mouth, whilst forming a menacing gargoyle claw with one’s left hand. Don’t forget the claw. That’s the most important part.

The next morning I woke up, nursing an inexplicably scraped knee, pounding headache and the memory of several embarrassing conversations from the night before. My phone’s inbox looked like a reader-board of popular Texts From Last Night including “Are you alive?” and “I have a weird story. It involves a jug of Carlo Rossi and a dog with a beer cozy around its neck.” It was only Friday. After gulping water and vomiting up last night’s indiscretions, I rolled over to my friend as she chattered about that night’s plans. “This place is like running a marathon,” I said, careful to not lift my head too high. “Except usually during a marathon you pace yourself. This is a marathon of sprints.” And that it was. Blackout. Sleep. Repeat.

Lucky for my liver, I learned my lesson after “Thirsty Thursday.” I played it safe enough to avoid more early morning conversations with their bathroom floor, but drinking enough cheap beer to avoid embarrassing myself in front of my iron-stomached friends. It wasn’t until my last day at the State School, when someone finally asked me, “so what are parties at Northwestern like?”

I paused, the shotski hovering at my open mouth.

Not like this. Not once that weekend did I pay to get into a fundraiser party, or hear someone drop their SAT score in a solo cup conversation. Not once did I have to shuttle north to a freshman-filled frat house, or end my evening in the blue plastic booth of a 24-hour fast food establishment. But not once did the State School parties erupt into a spontaneous dance party to both Animal Collective and Miley Cyrus. Not once did their Kings games develop into hilarious and thoughtful discussions that continued long after the keg was tapped. It was easy to find friends at the State School. Instantaneous and well-lubricated connections formed quickly over common “shittttt show” stories. If State School friends are the kids you water ski with each summer at camp, Northwestern friends are your brothers in battle, your allies in the trenches of Tech.

“Not like this,” I said again, shaking off the burn of whiskey with a grimace. That’s for sure.