A BELEAGUERED RPI STUDENT LAYS incapacitated after a heavy dose of the treacherous drug, resilience, and regrets his decision.There’s a new drug on the street, and not only is it legal, but also high level school faculty are pushing it onto students. Ten times more powerful than adderall, using the street name “Resilience,” students in droves are turning towards this new self medication method in order to get through classes.
The spread of this new drug can be traced back to an email sent out at the beginning of the semester. The sender, a university president who wishes to remain anonymous, called for students to stand tall and to be like a coursing river, then quoting more lyrics from the Disney movie Mulan. The Poly was not able to confirm whether the author was using Resilience when they wrote the email. However, what we do know is that campus services have been offering free books instructing students on how to “grow” Resilience for themselves.
Personally, I have seen many of my fellow gloomy eyed classmates turn into a different people through this process. One user, Chrissie Lounge ’16, says that Resilience is “literally the only reason I survived Modern Political Analysis of Agrarian Farming Practices of Inuit Tribes in the 18th Century.” Resilience seems to affect people differently though, some use it to get through a hard class while others use it to get through a meal at Commons. However, to know the true extent of its use, I had to see the results for myself.
So, one school morning I took my first hit of Resilience, hoping I would stay lucid enough through the day to see a marked difference in attitude. To my surprise, the results were almost instantaneous. I went to my 8 am class for the first time since the beginning of the semester, and I even took notes! Following this, I even began working on a project early, instead of crying in the shower practicing bodycurling as I normally would. I could now see how addictive this lifestyle is; instead of wallowing in self pity, I did homework, and instead of eating a tub of Ben and Jerry’s under my bed covers, I ate a salad in Commons! However, as all highs do, this one came down hard. All it took was a single look at my student loans and I was in the same place I was in the morning, bodycurling under my bed.
The high was definitely nice, but to be honest, Resilience seems to be too much work to be worth its payoff. I could do the same stuff I do on Resilience without it if I wanted to, but that’s the real kicker to Resilience which makes it so addictive; it makes you do those things you don’t want to do. I guess it’s nice in doses, as it certainly helped me write this boring as hell article, but I don’t like having my Netflix binging taken away by studying and other not so fun stuff. In short, drugs are meant to take you out of the world, not bury you in it, so find something better to push on your students, RPI!