After decades of greeting new members by pounding on doors and screaming in the wee hours of the morning, several student groups have begun to implement a new tradition, deemed “roll-ins”. Instead of waking up accepted members, groups now escort rejected students back to their dorm rooms and lock them in so that they will no longer be able to “bother them with their suckiness.” Roll-in times vary from group to group; most acapella groups will roll-in rejected students in the middle of their audition if they’re bad enough, while Stanford Mock Trial prefers to publicly denounce students in the dining hall before escorting them out mid-meal.
The most popular student groups on campus, such as Shakes, Stanford Debate, and Alliance Streetdance, have started renting small trucks to deliver multiple rejected members back into their dorms more efficiently. “We’ll send about two or three trucks to West campus every day, and then maybe a dozen or so towards Stern and Wilbur,” estimates Alliance Streetdance president Jerry B.
Albert K, a Stanford freshman living in Soto, recalls his own roll-in after a botched Fleet Street audition. “After they tucked me into bed, they just stood outside and violently hummed all the notes I had missed in my audition at me,” he recalls, “It sounded kind of like a swarm of angry musical bees.”
It remains to be seen what long-term effect this will have on the rejected students, but everyone else is just happy that they can get some uninterrupted sleep.
