The November Rule
"While Mens et Manus may be our decree when heard outside the school...here it\'s \r\n\r\nparete legi novembri\r\n\r\n...OBEY THE NOVEMBER RULE"\r\n\r\n-- Hack Punt Tool\r\n\r\nIt\'s November 1st. Hopefully all the seniors in high school reading this post submitted their early application yesterday, and are already dying to check that fateful webpage sometime in the middle of December.\r\n\r\nHere at MIT, the date is significant for a different reason - it\'s the day that the November Rule technically "expires".\r\n\r\nWhat is the November Rule? It\'s the unspoken rule we have on campus that freshman-upperclassman relationships are strictly forbidden until November 1st. While this mostly applies to upperclassmen as a warning not to mack on the frosh, Newton\'s Third Law dictates that it applies to the frosh as well. An important note: the rule does not apply to freshman-freshman relationships, but I\'ll give my opinion on that later.\r\n\r\nWhy is this a thing? The Tech has their take, and I agree with pretty much everything in this article, but I\'ll say my spiel anyways.\r\n\r\nFreshman fall is kind of a shitshow. In the course of a few weeks, you have to learn how to deal with classes (which are suddenly very difficult and nothing at all like that easy shit in high school), how to balance extracurriculars, studying, and life, and make at least one good group of friends. This is not easy. Peoples\' experiences with freshman fall lie on the scale of "it was a little rough to adjust to" to "it was a nuclear disaster", and anybody not on that scale is lying.\r\n\r\nIn the midst of this shitshow, the last thing you need to be doing is getting into a relationship of any sort. Your self-esteem is already being tested - the classes are hard and suddenly you\'re getting Bs and Cs and even failing tests, and you feel like you\'re stupid and you don\'t belong here. The last thing you need is to get into a relationship and go through a bad breakup and feel even shittier. You might not even know that it\'s possible to feel even shittier, but it is. Plus, no matter what type of relationship you have - on the spectrum from just hooking up to full blown monogamy - it\'ll take up a non-trivial amount of your time, and possibly occupy a non-trivial amount of your emotional capacity, neither of which are in great abundance during freshman fall. Granted, you\'ll probably have more free time during freshman fall than in any other semester, but the importance of managing your time well cannot be understated, and freshman fall is the time to learn how to do that. It is not the time to be worrying if somebody wants to hook up with you or not. That can come when you have your shit marginally figured out.\r\n\r\nAs an associate advisor for freshmen, one of the biggest reasons that most of us give re. holding off on relationships during the first few months at MIT is the harm it could inflict on other budding social groups. Say you get into a relationship, and as is common in relationships, you spend a lot of time together and neglect other social groups that you might be forming. Now say that you break up, and\xc2\xa0suddenly find that you don\'t have a group of friends, and most friend groups have already stabilized and it\'s hard to work your way in. This is obviously a fairly bad scenario, and if you\'re reasonable about relationships, then this won\'t happen. But most of us here have seen it happen, and that\'s why we always give this example as fair warning.\r\n\r\nNotice that I didn\'t specifically call out freshman-upperclassman relationships. I\'m calling out all relationships, including freshman-freshman ones, because I think what I said above holds true in both cases. But the November Rule specifically targets freshman-upperclassman relationships, and that\'s because of the power dynamic.\r\n\r\nThere are a lot of opinions on whether there actually is a power dynamic between upperclassmen and freshmen. I saw a recent MIT Confession that argued that there isn\'t really, since most of the "power" upperclassmen have is from being experienced and wise denizens of MIT, when in reality most upperclassmen aren\'t, or at least don\'t feel that way. I personally believe that this is untrue. I can attest to the fact that I definitely don\'t\xc2\xa0feel\xc2\xa0like I have any idea of what\'s going on at MIT, but the fact is that I do. I\'ve had an entire year here. Whether I realize it or not, I now know a lot of things that I definitely didn\'t know freshman fall. Some examples:\r\n
- \r\n \t
- Starting a pset the night before it\'s due will not end well \r\n \t
- Though it might have worked in high school, staying up late every day fooling around and sleeping 4 hours a night is not a sustainable lifestyle \r\n \t
- Doing All The Extracurriculars That Seem Cool is also unsustainable - you have to eventually pick and choose \r\n \t
- Failing a test is okay and is not the end of the world (I remember getting a fifth week flag in 5.111 and feeling like my world was in fact ending but this is okay, I passed and lived to tell the tale) \r\n