I stumbled across an article in September’s Wired magazine that explained freshman year dorm life better than any Resident Adviser or orientation packet could. The article, “The Buddy System: How Medical Data Revealed Secret to Health and Happiness” by Jonah Lehrer, profiles the work of two scientists who stumbled on detailed health information for several generations of a small town’s population, including the prevalence of obesity, smoking and happiness. 

They demonstrated that health behaviors spread like a virus through a network of people.

Over the course of the study, having an obese friend increased your risk of becoming obese by a whopping 171 percent. If your friend quit smoking, you were 36 percent more likely to quit. Amazingly, your probability of being happy increased by 9 percent with every happy friend you had, but a $5,000 increase in income was good for only 2 percent.

 
The similarity to my floor in Morrill Tower freshman year struck me immediately, and if you’re currently living on campus and battling the freshman 15, it probably struck you too.

By yourself, you might not choose to eat PAD pizza four times a week, but when your whole suite orders it for lunch every day, a “new norm” is established, according to the article. As long as your floor is gaining weight with you, you don’t feel like you’re any different, and so you pack on the pounds. Maybe freshmen 15 would be more accurate.

Your friends aren’t just jeopardizing your waistline. Winter Quarter of my freshman year, a whole suite of guys got really, really into a video game, and as a result, class attendance and GPAs plummeted (My GPA freshman year, by quarter: 3.8, 4.0, 2.9). Average floor bedtimes crawled from 11 p.m. to midnight to 1 a.m. Average per capita beer consumption left the realm of the measurable. 

It’s not the explicit peer pressure of high school. It’s a whole new kind of collective rationalization — “Well, at least I’m not as fat as…” or “Hey, at least I went to class more times this week than….” It’s a difficult cycle to break, as evidenced by my current apartment consisting of four seniors. Individually, we’re all good students with great work ethics. Together, we will sit in the living room and watch four consecutive hours of TNT. 

So are your friends worth it? Even with the case laid out above, I’m going to say yes.

In the study, unhappy people were rarely found at the center of clusters of friends. The scientists also analyzed Facebook profile pictures as a means of testing their hypothesis on college students. They found that people with smiling profile pictures not only tended to be friends with other smilers but were 15 percent more likely than nonsmilers to have more close friends. Smokers also quit together, not individually.

My advice? Latch onto the one girl on your floor who’s always at the RPAC or the one guy in your house who actually cooks and studies.