Georgetown doesn’t have a huge drug scene, but many students smoke pot recreationally. Students often find it difficult to find dealers, though, and it’s even harder to find good places to smoke. Most students end up smoking in their dorm rooms or apartments, which is generally fine, though every once in a while people do get caught. A persistent rumor holds that the University’s smoke detectors are actually heat detectors and, therefore, won’t go off due to cannabis fumes. Proceed at your own risk.

The general rule is that RAs and DPS officers aren’t looking to bust anyone, so don’t give them a reason to. Make sure there aren’t any “suspicious odors” to investigate and you should be fine. As for smoking outside, Georgetown is located in an urban area, so there aren’t many options. Vox can’t tell you where to smoke, but check out these fine places to enjoy nature instead.

According to Vox‘s research, a gram costs about $20, which seems about an average price, and a eighth runs about $60. (That’s probably not accurate. Commenters, feel free to chime in.) Most of the people who deal to students are small-time and many are students themselves. The administration takes drug violations seriously, and, as a result, many students have trouble finding dealers.

Some schools, apparently, have parties where students will serve weed along with alcohol. Nothing like that happens at Georgetown. Most of the time, people smoke in small groups with their friends.

Hard drugs aren’t prevalent at Georgetown. Cocaine takes a long second place to weed in popularity. People use other drugs like molly and LSD, but you have to know someone to get it. Usually, students will take those sorts of party drugs right before going to clubs. Study drugs are somewhat popular as well, though, again, access is limited.

Also, for some reason, Georgetown always gets associated with meth, though usually it’s actually DMT or The Hoya jumping to conclusions.

Vox‘s disclaimer yesterday applies here: This preview is intended to provide a realistic picture of undergraduate drug culture at Georgetown University. Most of the information here is common knowledge and does not come from personal experience. Vox doesn’t endorse breaking any laws.

These series of previews is intended to provide a realistic picture of undergraduate drinking and drug culture at Georgetown University. Most of the information here is common knowledge and does not come from personal experience. Vox doesn’t endorse breaking any laws.

While some stodgy old Georgetown neighbors may rank the University among the top party schools in the country, it’s more accurate to say that Georgetown’s drinking, sex, and drug culture is typical among rigorous, East-Coast schools. Like at most colleges, drugs and alcohol play a large role in social life, though not an overwhelming one.

What follows is an exhaustive guide to everything you were too timid to ask your tour guides or your parents. Instead of posting about all three vices at once, Vox is breaking up the illicit activities preview into three posts. Today is alcohol.

Drinking as a freshman

While underage drinking is very prominent, it’s not as available as it would be at, say, a big state school. Freshmen, and sophomores even, find it difficult to find places to go out and party on weekend nights. While that’s not such a bad thing (learn to enjoy weekend nights in with your floor), it can lead to some annoying practices by freshmen.

Your first semester at Georgetown, you’ll probably end up mostly going to big house parties to drink. Most freshmen are eager to get inebriated and will try to get in to parties they weren’t invited to. This otherwise wouldn’t be a problem, except that freshmen have a bad tendency to let their entire floor tag along with them.

Usually, upperclassmen don’t mind leaving their doors open for some fresh faces to wander in. When you do knock on someone’s door, though, come in a small group. No one likes to let 25 random people into their party. Keep groups sizes closer to 4 or 6, and be open to making conversation with other people once you’re there.

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Your freshman experience at Georgetown depends heavily on which of the four freshman dorms you find yourself in, and, along with your school within the University, which dorm you’re living in will dominate much of the banal conversations you’ll have during NSO. The freshmen dorms are where you’ll likely make your first friends and first start to feel at home on the Hilltop.

But it’s important to remember that, while your dorm determines where you end up living, it doesn’t determine how you end up living. Things you can control, like who your friends are, what groups you join, and what you study, have a much larger impact on how your first year at Georgetown goes than the fact that you’re doomed to live in an assigned room for that entire year.

Each dorm has its own ups and downs, but, as far as what the actual rooms are like, the dorms are not all that different. Every freshman shares his or her room with one roommate and has a reasonable amount of space, along with a twin-size bed, desk, and closet area. Some dorms offer some special perks like sinks or bathrooms, but, for the most part, the rooms are all very similar.

Don’t expect to find out where you’ll be living for a while, though. Housing guards your room assignments till “early” August .

New South

Georgetown’s largest freshmen dorm is also the one that can be described as the most “typical” college dorm. New South has very long, branching hallways and floors packed with loads of freshmen. Its large size and population lends itself to being the most raucous of the dorms. Denizens of “Zoo South” should expect loud Friday and Saturday (and sometimes Thursday) nights. Fortunately, New South is very close to Lauinger Library, so it’s not difficult to escape any noise.

Read about the rest of the dorms after the jump!

Along with doing laundry more than once a year and eating things other than Pop-tarts, one of the greatest challenges in going to college is living with people you don’t know. Your freshman floor will be a curious amalgam of different cultures, students hailing all the way from the northern part of New Jersey to the southern part of New Jersey, and it may be difficult to adapt.

One of the most important among these relationships is your roommate.  While the quality of your freshman year isn’t contingent on your relationship with your roommate, it definitely helps to be friendly. Your room is, in effect, your home, and the less turbulent your home life, the more you can focus on other things.

Vox is going on three years of cohabitation with her roommate from freshman year, so she feels like she’s in a position to dispense a little wisdom, especially about CHARMS, or the Campus Housing Roommate Matching System. People definitely find great roommates otherwise, whether it be through GAAP weekend, Facebook, or being randomly paired up, but for the majority of you, CHARMS is the quickest and easiest way to find a compatible roommate—at least, if you do it right.

“It’s like an online dating service!” people will giggle at you, but seriously—it’s like an online dating service. And while Vox is in absolutely no position to give you dating advice, here are a few hints that will help make sure CHARMS is good for both of you:

Wisdomous wisdom after the jump

Dear class of 2017,

Welcome to your first post on Vox Populi, the blog for on-campus newsmagazine the Georgetown Voice. We will continue to delight and inform you over the next four years and beyond.

You’ve made it through years of hellish workloads, early mornings, late nights that have turned into early mornings, sports practices and Model United Nations, years of working toward a perfect GPA, getting into your dream school, and all-around overachieving. So congratulations, and welcome to Georgetown, where it will be completely, utterly, earth-shatteringly similar.

A few things will be different from high school, however, and that’s why Vox is here with the Prefrosh Preview—a weekly post to help you maneuver your way through your first year at Georgetown. We’ll cover topics ranging from academics to the party scene, so be sure to check back on Thursdays for updates.

The first key difference between Georgetown and your high school, and here Vox is definitely underestimating the number of kids who went to Phillips Exeter, is that your high school does not have the same kind of rich history and traditions that Georgetown does, tailgates excluded.

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First off, we’d like to give an official Vox Populi welcome to the Class of 2016, for officially graduating from “pre-frosh” to bona fide freshmen. As you begin your career on the Hilltop, you’re going to notice that, although your fellow classmates may have different interests and hail from different corners of the Garden State, there is one habit that unifies the student body like no other: Complaining about the University. Here, Vox has compiled a rundown of Hoyas’s most common topics of complaint, why they do so, and how to deal with them a little more effectively.

Facilities

• Why we complain: Blame it on Target catalogues that show college dorms with enough room for home theaters and popcorn machines, but most kids go to college under the delusion that their dorms will be big, perfectly furnished, and spotless. So it’s easy to forget before moving in that your room has been lived in by an unfathomable number of people, many with doubtlessly questionable hygiene and destructive living habits, before you. So your blinds might fall off (Editor’s Note: Mine did), your toilet might overflow, your lights will burn out, and you’ll have to wait some undesirably long amount of time before Maintenance comes around to fix them.

• What to do instead: Make sure you report everything, and we do mean everything, in the Room Condition Report you fill out in the beginning of the year—it’ll keep you from being charged for the mess that the inhabitants of yesteryear left in their wake. If you have any problems with your room’s facilities that you really can’t deal with on your own (burnt-out light bulbs, broken drawers, even low water pressure in your shower), put in a work request immediately: Sure, it will still take a couple of days, but the worst thing you can do is wait.
• Read the rest of this entry »

Freshmen move-in to campus begins this Friday afternoon, and prefrosh previews are still along the way. As we’ve done each year, Vox runs a comprehensive review of the last year’s important on-campus news stories. The past two semesters have seen some interesting headlines pass through: from the birth control debate to the unionizing of on-campus workers. Much to learn you still have, young padawans.

All you need to know about GUSA (goo-sa)

The Georgetown University Student Association is your undergraduate student government. The government is comprised of a president, vice-president, cabinet, and 25-member Senate (elected at-large and for dorms).

GUSA plays a hand in several aspects of student life, from funding the Summer Fellows program, weekend GUTS buses, subsidizing LSAT courses, and bringing free newspapers to campus.

Last semester’s election was heated. Six candidates ran against each other for the GUSA executive positions, with a variety of campaign antics. Some tactics failed, and some tactics were just plain corny.

Currently, the GUSA president is Clara Gustafson (SFS ’13) and the vice-president is Vail Kohnert-Yount (SFS ’13). You are to address them on campus as “your honor” and bow deep at any sighting. In the first few months of their reign, Kohnert-Yount and Gustafson established a Secretary for Social Justice, supported a resolution to increase the burden of proof standard to clear-and-convincing, and promised to support student interests throughout the future campus plan negotiations.

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Vox brings you hear some useful advice on crime news around the area. Georgetown campus and neighborhood are relatively safe, but crime isn’t unheard of.

Hide your laptop, hide your wife

The most common type of crime at  Georgetown is property theft. Laptops and bicycles are the most frequently stolen items and there are several safety measures you can take.

It is important to not leave your laptop unattended for any length of time in a non-secure location.  As long as it is always within your view, you can make sure that no one takes it. Also make sure to lock your room when nobody is inside. While you may only be stepping out for a minute, that is enough time for someone to sneak in and take something.

For bikes, make sure to use a bike lock that locks from the front wheel. It is also recommended that you register your bike as this is potentially the only way to recover a stolen bicycle.

GOCard fraud is another type of property theft. Since merchants rarely check the picture ID, it is easy to steal debit dollars. If your GOCard does go missing, make sure to deactivate it on the GOCard website.

Burglaries are not unheard of around campus and in the larger off-campus areas. To prevent this, it is once again important to lock the doors to your dorm room/apartment even if you are only going to be out for a short period. The majority of the burglaries are results of unlocked doors.

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As NSO descends upon the Hilltop, the incoming freshmen will no doubt be a little scared, unnerved, or weirded out by some of the newness of college life. Here, we’ve compiled a handy list of some common people and things you’ll encounter during your first week here at Georgetown, and some advice about how to deal with them.

List compiled by Leigh Finnegan and Rob Sapunor, drawings by Kathleen Soriano-Taylor.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this post is not intended to be legal advice, but merely conveys general information related to legal issues commonly encountered by students at Georgetown.

We the people…

Under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the government may not search a person or seize their effects in a place where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as a dorm room or a telephone booth, unless a judicial authority grants police or other agents of the state a specific authorization based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.

Under the Exclusionary Rule, law enforcement may not use evidence against a person if it was obtained during the course of an illegal search.

General exceptions

These include a “stop and frisk” based on reasonable suspicion, seizure of contraband in plain view, search of a place in order prevent an emergency or secure volatile evidence, and searches conducted with the consent of the occupant.

Also, excessive noise, the smell of smoke, or any other indication of a potential safety risk will also allow any agent of the state to enter your room.

Students’ rights in dorms

Students have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their dorms, and the state may not violate it without warrant, period. There is no unified case law, but state and federal courts have held that the Fourth Amendment also applies when university officials are sworn officers of the state [1], they conduct searches accompanied by law enforcement [2], or when their primary purpose in conducting a search is to enforce of local law [3].

However, a housing contract can waive certain Fourth Amendment rights and allow University officials to enforce student conduct policy [4].

Several courts have also held that a university can legally turn over to police any evidence it obtains in the course of a search pursuant to its conduct policy [5].

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