Professors know my first name, and often enough I call them by theirs. I don't say "Good morning, Professor Gordon," I say "Hey Jill."

Sometimes we invite them to lunch, sometimes they invite us to dinner, sometimes they hang out at departmental pub nights or other relatively informal events where you get to see them argue with each other, which is one of the coolest things ever.

You can frequently drop by their offices unannounced, whether or not it's class-related.

Students with similar academic interests can have conversations that can seem foreign to others, and they can go on forever, but on the other side of the spectrum there isn't typically a ton of intellectual chatter between friends in wildly different majors, unless it's a relatively broad topic and/or the conversation doesn't delve too deeply. In any case, though, most people have an obvious passion for what they're majoring in, unless they're more invested in a particular extracurricular, which also happens.

For a small college in central Maine, Colby's pretty diverse, and there are clubs representing different ethnic groups, the LGBT community, different religious denominations, and so on, but from time to time there are tensions. Most of the time these are overwhelmingly outweighed by pride, fortunately. More importantly, in most social situations, I personally find differences of this sort to be interesting but less than relevant. Interests make more friends than sexual orientation or skin color.

Clique-wise, some people certainly stick to "their type of people," but there's also a lot of mingling and most people have a ton of acquaintances from different groups.

It's my impression that some students think they're more political than they are, but that scene's still pretty active. Most Colby folks lean left at least a little, although there's a vocal conservative minority and a large chunk of relatively quiet people in the middle or on the fringes.

I think the drama and music scenes are two of the best things about Colby. The Theater and Dance Department puts on a few big shows every year, but the Powder and Wig drama club, which is open to anyone who auditions, also does a lot. Those productions are smaller, but they're still pretty damn fun. Or intense. Often both. In the past few years they've done And Then There Were None, Around the World in 80 Days, Alice in Wonderland, and Proof, among others.

The student band scene is growing, and our six a cappella groups perform for everything from cider socials downtown to humanitarian benefit concerts, apart from their invitationals and semester shows. We recently had a Battle of the Bands at the local opera house, which featured acts from Colby and from Waterville, the surrounding town.

If I'm awake at 2am on a Tuesday morning, I might be doing homework or I might be in the office of the Echo, our student newspaper. If I AM doing homework, it's still because I spent a long night in the Echo office. The Echo is something I've gotten progressively more involved with over the years, and I love it. My freshman year I think I wrote five articles. My sophomore year I wrote an opinions piece almost every week and did a lot of concert reviews in the spring. Now I don't write opinions columns that often but I'm one of two copy editors who goes over the whole paper before we send it in for publishing, and I've also been writing more in the arts & entertainment section. Everyone I know seems busier than they ever have been plus people went abroad so social dynamics in the groups I used to hang out with are kinda different, so knowing that I'll see the Echo staff every Tuesday night is nice.

Work hard, play hard[er]!

Most people are from either twenty minutes outside of Boston or halfway around the world; Colby has drinking teams with sports problems; you're either preppy or crunchy; you carry a Nalgene and wear a North Face fleece and/or jacket...

Often enough for the stereotypes to be unsurprising. We have more students from Mass. than from Maine, it's true, and between us and our sister schools (Bowdoin and Bates), we have the biggest international population. It's also true that many Colby teams hold beer dear, but no more so than at any other college. And yeah, pretty much every day on the General Announcement e-mails, someone's lost a Nalgene or a North Face. But I, at least, own neither. Some people are preppy, some people are crunchy, some fall in between, but a decent chunk fall outside the box, too.

All of which is to say that the stereotypes work from a distance, but as with anything else, the truth is a little more complicated and a lot more interesting.

A lot of Colbians have a whiny sense of entitlement, and some are snobby asses, but a lot of Colbians are also really awesome people, and I like almost everyone I've spent more than ten or twenty minutes with.