It’s the start of the new semester and school year, and you’re circling the classroom, sharing your name, pronouns, hometown, and class year. While everyone else introduces themselves, you’re too busy crafting your own answer to catch theirs.
Or, maybe you’re getting coffee at Wiggins with a friend when you run into someone you have yet to meet. You get introduced, but there’s that awkward moment when you realize…
You have no idea what year they’re in.
Rule #1: Never directly ask what grade they’re in.
Seriously, don’t do it.
If you assume an upperclassman is a freshman, you are inevitably hurting their ego. They will probably spend the rest of the interaction questioning if people perceive them as mature or blaming you for a newfound insecurity about their outfit choice that morning. Conversely, if you mistake a senior who spent a year abroad as a sophomore, you now look like the clueless one. Worst of all, if you accidentally promote a freshman to a sophomore or junior status, they will feel on top of the world. Freshmen love feeling like they’ve got it all figured out. While they will have a routine down soon enough, for now, their confidence must remain slightly lower than that of a sophomore or junior, because how else would they be identifiable?
Confidence really is the name of the game.
A trick to guessing someone’s grade is based on how they carry themselves. Do they walk into a room like they own the place, immediately finding their group of friends? Or are they nervously scanning the room before sheepishly asking if they can sit with some small group congregating in the atrium?
Where it gets tricky is with athletes. Athletes hang out with their teammates and have high confidence from day one, regardless of grade. Athletes also tend to blur grade lines since they will sit, study, take classes, socialize, or eat meals with people from other years. Because student-athletes have large built-in groups of friends, it is far more challenging to identify who is seasoned and who just arrived on campus. At that point, you can make an educated guess based on which faces look familiar.
While Kenyon is a small school and it should be easy enough to figure out who is who, people are constantly going abroad, graduating a semester late, or having completely different class schedules from you. Someone you’ve never seen before may very well be in the same grade as you, so don’t assume they’re a new student too quickly.
To make things easier, here are a few tips to discover someone’s grade without outright asking:
- Instagram is your best friend. After an interaction, check their bio. Odds are their graduating year will be in their bio.
- Ask about housing. “Where are you living this year?” is a subtle enough question to not raise suspicions, but it gives you plenty of clues. Dorms often correlate with grades, or at least will differentiate a freshman from a student in any other class. No sophomore, junior, or senior will live in the freshman quad. But remember that it is possible for sophomores and juniors to live in apartment-style living before senior year.
- Casually mention roommates. If you have ruled out the possibility of someone being a freshman, then that means they’re capable of choosing their roommate. You can casually ask, “Oh, do you have a roommate this year?”, then follow up with, “What grade are they in again?”. Odds are, the roommate is the same grade, and now you’ve got your answer without ever making it weird. There’s nothing wrong with admitting you don’t know someone else’s grade; the main concern is revealing your cluelessness to someone’s face.
