#74: Giving Up THE Most Outrageous thing for Lent

Notre Dame Students love lent.  They love not seeing priests wear green every week, they love their inability to eat meat on Fridays, and they love the food the dining hall is able to prepare each Friday without meat (actually, they don’t love this at all, but hate it).  However, the most important part of Lent for Notre Dame Students is what they choose to give up for the season.

Many Notre Dame Students feel an incessant need to prove how Catholic they are to all of their peers and this desire oftentimes manifests itself by making religion a competition amongst students (see #4).  One way that Notre Dame Students can prove that they are more Catholic than other Notre Dame Students is by giving up something for Lent that is more outrageous and ridiculous than what their friends give up.

For some people these sacrifices are related to food.  Students might give up meat during all of Lent or give up something even crazier like cheese.  Some might give up Starbucks (see #22) or Reckers (see #14) while others might expand on that and give up all fried food.  Many Notre Dame girls might attempt to give up the FroYo machine, but this doesn’t last long.  Still others might take things a step further and limit or cease their consumption of alcohol during Lent. 

Many students give up completely different things ranging from using the elevator in their dorm (obviously only possible in the newer dorms) to something along the lines of the infamous Seinfeld episode, The Contest.  Other students might try to add something to their daily routine like working out more, studying more, or praying more. 

While Notre Dame Students might give many reasons for making sacrifices during Lent, deep down they all know that the things they give up for Lent are meant as a way to show other people how Catholic they are and how much more religious they are than the typical student.  All Notre Dame Students want to be the MOST Catholic student, and Lenten sacrifice is just another way to accomplish this objective.

#73: Digger Phelps

Basketball season at Notre Dame is usually most notable because it is the end of the football season, but there are certain things about Notre Dame Basketball that are uniquely enjoyed by Notre Dame Students (at least some students).  Digger Phelps is one of those things.

Digger Phelps was the head basketball coach at Notre Dame in the 70’s and 80’s, and probably the most successful coach in the history of Notre Dame Basketball.  He holds the NCAA record for most upsets of number one ranked teams, and led the Irish to their only appearance in the Final Four in 1977.  He is the son of an undertaker.

Despite the fact that these successes occurred before current Notre Dame Students were even born, the student body likes Digger Phelps for things that have nothing to do with his coaching prowess. 

Like Lou Holtz (see #23), current Notre Dame students like Digger Phelps for his oversized personality and his appearance on the ESPN College GameDay program (the basketball version).  Similarly to Holtz, Phelps uses the program to make unreasonable predictions about how the Fighting Irish will do in their games (although unlike Holtz he is capable of picking against the Irish squad) and as a way to showcase his uncanny ability to match the color of his highlighter to the color of his necktie.

Not only do Notre Dame Students like Digger Phelps for the unnecessary publicity he brings to their basketball program, but they also like him for his willingness to make frequent appearances on campus for events ranging from pep rallies to dorm talks.  At pep rallies, he is one of the most intense speakers the university has at its disposal, and he can make the crowd overly excited even when the team’s predicament is most dire.

If his pep rallies are noted for their intensity, his dorm talks are noted for their bizarreness.  When Digger starts talking in a dorm he will seamlessly transition from talking about his life and his career in basketball to talking about his political opinions about globalization and America’s future.  While oftentimes unpredictable, these talks can be even more interesting than those of the beloved Fr. Hesburgh (see #56)

Overall, Notre Dame Students like Digger Phelps because his personality matches their zeal and his devotion to the school brings him back again and again.  Whether they see him at pep rallies, on ESPN, at dorm events, or in the bars around South Bend, Digger Phelps can excite students in a way that few personalities are able.

#72: Talking About How Awesome London Was

One of the great experiences that many students have while attending Notre Dame is studying abroad.  During their junior year students can spend a semester or even a year studying in many far-reaching corners of the globe at locations such as Shanghai, China; Toledo, Spain; Santiago, Chile; Dublin, Ireland; and Fremantle, Australia.  These (and other) locations are interesting because of how their programs are set up.  Many feature students living with host families and taking classes with students from around the world.

Of all the abroad programs, however, the most unique and important is The London Program.

The London Program is unique because it is operated entirely by the University.  Students live in flats filled with other Notre Dame Students (in a building dominated by Notre Dame Students), they take all of their classes with only Notre Dame Students (classes that are taught by Notre Dame professors, in a building owned by the University), and they spend much of the semester travelling around Europe with other Notre Dame Students.

While other abroad programs grant students the opportunity to live and learn with students of different cultures, the London Program gives students the opportunity to create a miniature version of Notre Dame in a city that is decidedly more interesting than South Bend, Indiana.  These students embrace this opportunity by making new groups of Notre Dame friends and expanding their part of the Notre Dame network (see #85).

When these students return to campus from London, they continuously talk about how awesome London was.  They talk about going to clubs that aren’t named Fever.  They talk about going on weekend trips to Prague and Sweden and about drinking Ice Dragon in their flats.  These students talk incessantly about how awesome their booze cruise was on the River Thames, and they have seemingly added the word cheers to their everyday speech.

These students are able to talk about how awesome London was because they have other people to reminisce about it with.  While students in other abroad programs might have known a handful of other people from Notre Dame at their location, students in The London Program literally come back with new groups of friends who they can discuss their adventures with—and all of their old friends will have to sit through their stories again and again (especially the stories about the booze cruise).

However, students that didn’t study in London will eventually learn that the great thing about all of these stories is that it makes an entire class of students more tightly knit.  The 200 (or so) people that go to London each semester might come back with new friends, but these new friends will be linked with old friends and each class will seemingly become smaller. 

For this reason, the students that didn’t go to London tolerate all of the chatter about London because they will have made new friends because of how awesome London was.  

#71: Viewpoint Wars

The Observer is one of the most loved or hated things at Notre Dame.  Some students make sure to read it every day, always checking the Question of the Day (see #46), the Viewpoint section, the front page, and (of course) the comics.  Other students almost never pick up the paper, instead opting to read the complimentary national newspapers with their dining hall meals.

However, if there is one thing that can get every Notre Dame Student to pick up and read The Observer, it is raging Viewpoint war about a controversial issue.  While some of these issues come up for a short while (such as Barack Obama speaking at commencement) and will probably never appear in the Viewpoint section again, many issues that create Viewpoint wars appear in the section on an almost annual basis.

Issues such as the unique relationship between Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s (see #43.5), the disappointing nature of the football team, bookstore basketball team names, violence off-campus, single-sex dorms, and the acceptance of LGBT students at Notre Dame appear quite frequently in the pages of the viewpoint section.  Nearly every year an incident will happen that will again bring these issues to the forefront and cause even the most reluctant Notre Dame Student to pick up The Observer and read the next level of rhetorical sparring.

When The Observer is in the midst of a Viewpoint War, their e-mail inbox is flooded with letters and comments about the controversy.  Even the most passive Notre Dame Student wants to get their two cents in and takes to their laptop to pen the most passionate (and usually predictable) argument possible.  The section becomes dominated by the single topic for days and weeks (or, in the case of Obama, months), and columns or letters not pertaining to the war simply fall by the wayside.

Viewpoint Wars are important because they depict Notre Dame Students at their best (or, more often, at their worst).  While they are always overblown, they depict the issues that are important to the student body, and the ones that are most controversial amongst the student body.  They get the students actively talking about topics, and they throw the most troublesome issues into the limelight.  Because of this, Notre Dame Students love Viewpoint Wars.

#70: Switching from Engineering to Business

Notre Dame Students have high expectations.  They expect a lot out of their professors: hoping for slides to be put online and class notes to be printed out.  They expect a lot from their Thursday nights: hoping for plenty of drinking and time to see all of their friends.  They expect a lot from their football team: a national championship or bust.  Most of all, however, Notre Dame Students expect a lot out of themselves.

Expecting a lot from themselves, students enter the University of Notre Dame expecting to participate in difficult and promising majors.  They state their intention to major in Pre-Med or Architecture or Science or Engineering knowing that these majors are complicated, and knowing that their completion will be challenging. 

Soon enough, however, Notre Dame Students will switch their major from Engineering (or a similarly taxing major) to Business (or a similarly less complicated major).

There are many reasons for this traditional switch in major (which usually comes in the second or third semester).  Some of these students had been originally pressured by their parents to do something they don’t want to do (and then rebel, because they are in college).  Many students were led to believe that their strengths were in math and science simply because they were great at these subjects in high school.  Other students simply do not know what they want to do with their life when they are 18 years old.

The most important reason, however, that students change their majors from engineering to business is so that these students have plenty of time to do things that are SO college at night and on the weekends (see #11).  While engineering classes have labs on Friday afternoons (and pre-med classes have their own things to do then), most business classes allow students to have wide open schedules on these Friday afternoons (and for upperclassmen, all of Friday) so that they can start their weekend off right.

Furthermore, the amount of work that business students have (and the level of attentiveness these students need for their classes) allow these students to spend many weeknights doing nothing but watching television and playing drinking games.  Once students realize that these are the things they want to take away from their college experience, they realize that it is time to change majors.

This major switch is exemplified by the science-business and math-business majors that appear for many sophomores.  These majors are briefly declared by many students who believe they need a change, but want to keep up the appearance that they are more academic than their business counterparts.  Usually they hold this distinction over the heads of their business-only friends for a semester or two pretending that they might actually go to med school until they realize the easier work load of a business major is the right way to go, and they declare a business-only major.

Overall, changing from engineering to a business major is one of the most popular major switches at the University of Notre Dame, a switch that is always taken lightly.