by Ben Canning

Back to Stanford University: Changing Lives Since 1891

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Two pictures from Moonsplash, one of the bigger parties on campus.

A party-goer's view

A party planner's view

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Due to the physical layout of Stanford, the social lives of Stanford students rarely result in breaching the Stanford Bubble. Every weekend, there are social events, guest speakers, open campus parties, and room parties within walking distance. As a result, there is never any need to go into Palo Alto or San Francisco in order to maintain one’s social life. In general most frat parties are all the same, an overcrowded dance floor with no place for people to talk or actually get to know people. Students often complain about this fact, but in light of the fact that few people actually feel comfortable being assertive in initiating things with people, the distraction and entertainment of a dance floor and loud live band seem better than the alternative of having a fairly shallow conversation with someone in a rather awkward social setting such as a house party with no alternative activity to talking if the conversation should run out, but you are still interested in spending time with the person. A detailed analysis of Stanford parties can be found here in the entry titled "Stanford Parties -- Art and Subterfuge."

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More Party Images

Proceed to Stanford Parties -- Art and Subterfuge (at the bottom of the linked page)

Back to The Stanford Dating Scene

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Posted at Mar 20/2006 03:51PM:
Philip Spitzer: I'm a freshman, and the idea is that you HAVE to go to all the main frat parties to make an appearance and to say that you went for the following week's conversations consisting of, "hey, watsup?...Not much, you?...Pretty good, Hey did you go to Moonsplash?...Ya dude it was sick" And so on and so forth. Honestly, many of the frat parties are just like all the others: People rubbing up against each other on the dance floor, waiting for an exceuse to go get beer or another drink. Some paries have a unique quality, like, say.. Foam! It was cool, but again, it was just you average party with a bunch of water and laundry detergent. Oh and the thing about some paying for parties and others not..yes that pisses me off