Step 1: Dress like a hipster. Wear a jean jacket under a crop top or a t shirt that is a primary color. Maybe orange, if it has a hole strategically placed as a sliding door to the soft skin above your waistline and made in such a way to imitate the soft ripples of a pond, it's the perfect shirt. Wear big, black boots under your rolled up jeans and 80's socks, circle lens glasses- you know, the ones that remind people of John Lennon and makes them assume you have a musical side, where you know music theory or have good taste in indie music, or an artistic side- and in the fall, turtlenecks under blazers. Get a tattoo, die your hair, cut it short, decorate your room with edgy paintings, have an old typewriter at your desk, fill one of your walls with old polaroids, only buy vintage furniture, like one of those side tables that look like a greek column for you to have your afternoon tea, have all your cups and coffee mugs be beakers and erlenmeyer flasks, hang your roses upside down, stack all your books on top of one another with their pages rather than the spine facing the living room, write an entry in your black, leather journal that you carry everywhere about how you exhausting it is having to articulate your ideas. Also you love Virginia Woolf and you don't read Harry Potter because its not considered "real" literature. Everything you do is a "...morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs…" (The Secret Histroy, Donna Tart) because you belong with that class of people who see books as tangible representations of the "fiery passions of the world bound in vellum and leather." You also probably have some sort of studyblr or instagram where you post black and white pictures of your coffee mug, the sky when it looks like cotton candy, or your desk with all your books scattered on it because you've accepted the fact that you're probably going to die at that desk studying or pretending to study.

Step 2: Engage in intellectual conversations with people about the ephemeral nature of our existence, or how people try so hard to look a certain way while acknowledging the fact that you yourself are entitled, but have the confidence to not care because it's no one's business that your tattoo isn't real. You're trying out what works for you.

Step 3: Make solo trips to the mountains and while you're driving, take a snapchat video of the beautiful stretch of road and sky in front of you while playing The Lumineers, Lord Huron, or Bon Iver in the background and post it on your story for people to see what an introspective, emotionally aware person you are. And while you're quoting Oscar Wilde, engaging in debates on the superiority of classic Russian Literature such as Leo Tolstoy or Fvodor Dostoevsky (even though you've only read half of Anna Karenina by Tolstoy) over British Literature while sprawled out on a bed of roses and sipping red wine, let everyone think you're even more complex by telling them you're actually a mathematics, physics or chemistry major rather than the english or philosophy major they thought you were. If Schrodinger's Cat placed so much emphasis on the observer, then God observed the universe and that's why the universe exists. Though I wonder who would agree.

But you don't want to have philosophical, existential talk all the time. Don't just question society like someone who smoked one too many cigarettes, you want to be one of those people who drinks too much black coffee all day and talk about how you're excited to marvel at the beauty and destruction of the collapse of civilization soon with all the abortion laws, climate change, and trump being president. You'd thrive in the apocalypse. Your favorite era is the seventies and you can name the first five toman emperors: Julius Caesar (tell them how you consider him the first emperor even though he was a dictator, in fact you'd make a great dictator), Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero. Comment on how for Tiberius and Caligula, it was like Stalin came into power right after Hitler since Tiberius was a depraved despot who purged the inner ranks while Caligula was malevolent and insane. You don't know much about roman history, but cracking a joke like that makes it seem like you really know what you're talking about. People can learn and recite information, it takes a deeper appreciation and understanding to make metaphors and crack cynical jokes.

Step 4: When someone is talking, make eye contact and smile with your entire face. It makes them feel welcome, and makes you seem more charismatic. To be even more charismatic on top of your edgy outfit and rad tattoos you designed yourself, walk on campus slowly. Like every gesture you make, every breath you're photosynthesizing, and every stride you take is premeditated because you're the kind of person who loves to read in coffee shops alone. You make good grades and there isn't anything that you do that isn't done with grace. You're the immaculate silhouette of every person's favorite character from a novel: that cold mannered charm with the air of the ancient world. You're the last machine in the conveyor belt for the production of cheerios. And that's something you'd say because you're intelligent but also eccentric and your mind works on the 11th plane of the 12th void. And if someone gets close enough to you to figure out that all your jokes and worldviews were thought out and recycled, low-key move on to other people who haven't heard your charm before. If people wonder why you don't value friendships or hint that you may be treating them unfairly by dropping them, say something like you're finding yourself, you're a free spirit who is here in Athens to free fall into who you could be, that there's nothing holding you back from moving to Europe the next day because you're a confident, independent free-spirit, that you're excited about life and even though you have a deep inner world, you don't get attached. You're even a tad bit emotionless because sentiments are illogical. You love human beings, but you hate people. You're not an introvert, you're just selectively social because genius comes from solitude. Of course, this doesn't make you sound entitled at all. This generation is so fucked up because social media has made us emotionally weak. When people back on the farming days were sad, or existential, or having anxiety, or lonely, they didn't have poetry on tumblr they would relate their heartbreak to, they didn't have snapmap to make them feel less alone, they couldn't sift through instagram to stalk their ex just to see their face again. No, these people had to pour everything into their sonata they were composing to lull their minds to a calm; they had to come up with words to write and say to themselves to keep themselves sane. These people were the real MVP. Not like romanticizing heartbreak is wrong or anything. Done intentionally or not.

All in all, as long as you dress a differently and drink black coffee like all the STEM majors- because it's all a competition to see who can post the most aesthetically pleasing notes, who can pull a longest all-nighter and act like a machine who runs on espresso and water- talk about society, good indie music (because pop music is for the lesser mortals who don't know good music), your passion and sensitivity for art and literature, and your hobbies of taking long drives on dirt roads or holding hands and taking long walks to the fridge, you'll be the center of attention. You'll fit right in. You'll let the ants be deceived by the same pair of eyes. Some of them might ask you to join their indie rock band. Others would ask you to spend every weekend going downtown and dancing at a gay bar or the ones that have expensive drinks and older people since every other bar is full of frat guys who simply don't have the ambition that you're looking for in your "life-long" companions. People will love you because you strut down College Ave like life's your aphrodisiac. And you roll your sleeves.