For most people, applying to college consists of one weekend locked in a room working on the Common App. You chronicle how you spent the last four years crusading against society’s ills: feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, teaching former gang members to appreciate Walt Whitman—anything to make you sound less mediocre. You print out those applications and lick all those envelopes, trying to forget this was the very thing that killed George Costanza’s fiancé on Seinfeld. You put the envelope in the mailbox and a warm wave of relief washes over you as you realize the situation is now out of your control. You recline into a thick leather arm chair with a bottle of Laphroaig scotch and become philosophical. Like a wise man once said, “College is like making love to a woman. Eventually, everyone gets in somewhere.” You relax, but you shouldn’t. The real danger has not even begun. If the App (and the envelope, of course) doesn’t kill you, your freshman year will.

The Dartmouth application is thorough, often uncomfortably thorough, like an airport security guard that doesn’t know when to stop the cavity search. However, the application overlooks one very important piece of information: medical history.

The Spartans used to leave the sickly babies in the mountainside to die. Had this policy continued to the present day, the Dartmouth Class of 2010 would be a lot smaller. We’re one sickly bunch of motherlovers. One need only look at any freshman dorm to know that disease is flourishing on our floors. A straw poll taken by the Blitz Operation Of Bissell Scientists (B.O.O.B.S) revealed that 99.2 percent of a wing of our dorm is sick. We have bouts of pink-eye, sinus infections, fevers, stuffy noses, and one acclaimed case of elephantitis [blitz me sometime, ladies—ed.]. The cold outside has left us with a common dilemma: Do we open our windows at night, allowing ourselves to wake up with the Bissell Bubonic and a stuffy nose, or do we close our windows and allow the disease already present in our room to fester and mutate into a super-disease capable of destroying our entire dorm, or setting fire to even more Bissell trashcans?

The freshmen’s general sickliness is confounded by the Dartmouth environment in general. College is probably the unhealthiest environment outside a Calcutta port-a-potty. Binge drinking at the frats, partying until 3pm, playing pong, indulging in chicken nuggets at Food Court while dispelling munchies. These are all bad decisions. No one ever said, “Damn, I shouldn’t have gone out on all those Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights.” Instead, they say, “Why did the alcohol have to run out for those Tuesday and Thursday nights?” No one ever said, “I wish I had a different schedule. I hate my 11, 12, and 2 schedule. I should’ve taken a 2A, maybe even a 10A. And don’t get me started on drills!”

You could say it’s our fault. Rather than going to Berkeley or Durham we decided to go to a college on the same latitude as Siberia. We head off to play pong with balls that fall in the pissy mud floor of the AD basement thinking that beer will sanitize it (n.b. the AD basement has many of the same characteristics that gave rise to the Black Death in medieval Europe). We feel, like mosquitoes drawn to bug-zappers, compelled to attend parties at Heorot where half the kids leave with pink eye.

Why couldn’t our medical histories be considered in applying to college? That way, the diseases that infest not just my room but the freshmen rooms around me might be alleviated somewhat. Pink-eye and sinus infections might be replaced by the periodic stuffy nose. The only diseases we’d have to worry about would be the sexually-transmitted ones at Psi U. And with a healthier campus, my hands wouldn’t have to smell like condoms all the time—from all that Purell.

Don’t feel bad for us freshmen. We are finally free from our parents and are enjoying the freedom. Just don’t share a drink with us. And if you have any health pointers, be a pal and give them to us. It’s in your own interest. After all, if the freshmen guys get sick, the freshmen girls are inevitably going to follow, and then, before you know it, half of every frat will be in bed with a box of tissues watching Judge Joe Brown all day. The feverish, diseased, pink-eye infested ‘010s would be a chemical weapon even Saddam Hussein could be proud of.