Well, here I am, first year College Student. Everyone has told me how great College life will be, and so far it has been ok. But it’s time to spice it up a bit. It’s time for… College pranks.
But do I have any ideas for some good college pranks? Hell no!
So I need some ideas for some good ones. If any of you have some tried and tested goodies… please share.
If you live int the dorms, oh my, you can have some fun:
-get a rope, tie doors on opposite sides of the halls together
-penny someone in
-get a garbage can, fill it mostly with water, lean it against someones door or the elevator
-get one of those sample shaving cream cans, get a nail, carefully hammer the nail into the can…say hello to Mr. Grenade.
This next one is good anywhere:
-anyone that passes out, marker rape them: ie- write things like “I love cock” on the back of their neck, where they won’t notice it, get creative
So many more suggestions, but I don’t want to hog them all.
Remember, Thinksnow does not encourage or condone willful illegal acts, so don’t try this at home, kids.
When I was a frosh back in '72, at an all female college, the neighboring all male college would have “panty raids.” Do they do that any more? At our school, what it basically amounted to was girls/women throwing panties out the windows to favored raiders. I think they then had contests as to who got the most, laciest, sexiest, that kind of thing. Probably pretty tame and lame according to today’s standards.
Is that the kind of thing you mean, MadHatter, group things that aren’t malicious?
MIT is famous/notorious for their pranks. There’s even a book published on the subject, and some places around the institute actually immortalize the pranks (the MIT COOP has photos aroubnd the wall, as does the newly refurbished building 26)
Pranks include things like assembling a “police car” atop MIT’s Great Dome, complete with a dummy policeman inside eating donuts, replacing the “Walk/Don’t Walk” sign with one reading “Chew/Don’t Chew”, and putting giant “scrubing bubbles” over the outside of a building that looked like it was covered in bathroom tiles.
One of the “hacks” (pranks) suggested when I was an undergrad, but not to my knowledge actually pulled off, was the “Weather Balloon of the Week”. Every week a giant weather balloon would go off in an enclosed space (phone booth, elevator, etc.), inflated by a CO2 canister. Of course, in today’s terrorism-aware world, doing something like that might be asking for trouble.
Title? Author? Publisher? ISBN? Extra copy to loan out?
“If At All Possible, Involve a Cow” by Neil Steinberg is a history of college pranks, including chapters on MIT and CalTech, the only two schools that rigourously document their pranks. There are two books published by the CalTech Alumnia Assoc. documenting their pranks as well. I don’t know about MIT, but if their is, its in the cow book.
Good Luck.
IF AT ALL POSSIBLE, INVOLVE A COW: A BOOK OF COLLEGE PRANKS by Neil Steinberg.
Unfortunately out of print, but well worth finding; do a booksearch on ABE or BookFinder.
Thank you to you both! I had heard of this book (NPR?), but had forgotton the title! Yay!
From a friend who went to Cornell University:
School of Archtecture (maybe?) - the upperclass students in the school regularly dump gallons of water on the freshmen class as they pose for their school photo.
And IIRC, something about painting footprints on the pathway as if the stautes of Ezra Cornell and another statue walked across to meet each other.
The Academic Urban Legend at Cornell University is that the statues of co-founders Cornell and White leap out of their chairs, meet in the middle of the courtyard, and shake hands every time a virgin passes by. The painted footprints are probably put there by outraged parents to prove to their children that virgins do in fact exist in Ithaca, New York.
Similar anecdotes probably exist at other institutions of higher learning. I first heard the “sinking library” story about MY school when I was an undergraduate, but it makes moer sense as a Northwestern story. Northwestern is built on a swamp.
– Betty Co-ed
…memories percolating up through the years…
Freshman year, OSU (The Ohio State University, not Oklahoma, TYVM), Taylor Tower (the north campus honors dorm)
It was a time of greener people, that is, the recycling program was in full swing. Imagine if you will, huge garbage-type cans on every floor filled with aluminum cans, just waiting for pick-up. Imagine further that some clever scholars have found out how to stop the elevator between floors.
Picture five young, adventurous lads wandering around at 2:30 in the morning with this knowledge and nothing in particular to do. We took a few of these cans to the 12th floor, stopped the elevator between the 12th and 11th and dumped the contents.
Oh, what a cacophony. My, what a racket. We just had to go to the basement to see what had happened.
Stopping between the ground and basement, we found, to our surprise, that very light, empty, aluminum cans did not, in fact smash themselves to bits. Rather they were slightly dented and that was about it. We also found out that the Night Attendants, formerly seated in the first floor lobby, were not terribly amused at the sound of a few hundred cans tumbling down the chute in the wee hours. In fact, as I recall, their exact description of their reaction was something like “you guys scared the shit ou of me!” or something to the effect.
We had to make elevator safety posters and were on probation for a month.
The North campus director said that honors student don’t get into less trouble, they just get into smarter trouble (in comparison with the students that get in trouble for peeing on the elevator control panels, I guess)
we told the director that we were conducting experiments with gravity and were timing the things…he didn’t buy it for some reason.
Getting back to more doable pranks.
If you’re in a dorm that has a common area phone, put shaving cream or another substance on the earpiece, and then have someone call that phone.
Get large quantities of popcorn, preferably air-popped, or even those annoying packing peanuts. At night, cover someone’s door frame with a large piece of cardboard. Put the popcorn in the space bewteen the cardboard and door, seal it up. In the morning - watch the fun.
If you get a friend drunk the possibilities are endless. Strip them to their underwear, put them in a chair and send them for elevator rides. Get an uncooked hot-dog, stand next to their bed, and swish the frank around the inside of their mouth. When they start to wake, turn around and zip up your fly, lots of fun.
Have fun.
pcubed
The best one I ever heard of was at Harvard, although it may have been an MIT student. Starting in January, everyday he would put on a black-and-white striped shirt and go to the football stadium. At 1:00 he would blow a whistle and then start throwing out breadcrumbs trying to attract birds. After a while, of course, the birds picked up the habit and gradually there were more and more birds showing up every day.
Until the first day of football season. At 1:00, the referee went out to the center of the field and blew his whistle to start the game, and hundreds of birds started landing on the field.
The student wrote it up for a psychology class as a study in behavioral conditioning.
This one is extremely tame but fun nonetheless.
Does your campus have any fountains?
Have you ever seen what a family-size bottle of Joy or Dawn can do to a fountain? 
Down here at Florida State University you are not considered a true student if you have not participated in “bubbling” Wescott fountain. It is a big, three tiered fountain with a sidewalk circling it and hedges circling that. It stars in many photos of the university. My friends and I snuck an entire huge bottle of Joy into the fountain and the bubbles eventually swamped the hedges!
Tally
well, if you live in the dorms, this will definitly work.
in our dorm rooms, the doors open into the room, not the hallway, so we decidewd to use this to our advantage. the entire hall got together, ducktaped accross the doorframe of this one girls room and filled the space between the tape and the door with peanuts and stuff. when she opened the door, WHOOSH it all fell in. she didn’t know who did it though.
ah, gotta love college.
Well, once when a friend (male) passed out we propped his mouth open and took pictures of all of us putting our penises in it.
Then we put copies of them in his mail box the next week.
Come to think of it, we probably should have tried to get money from him or something.
Favorite prank I ever read about:
One student was in the habit of returning to his parents’ place to stay the weekend. One Friday night, after said student had left, the other students on that floor jumped into action- they ripped the doorframe out, removed the knob from the door, plastered over the door and re-painted it, put some small graffitti in the area to match the rest of the hall, and hung a signboard on the door and tacked old messages to it.
When the student returned ‘home’, he couldn’t find his room- where there had once been a door, there was now just a standard stretch of hallway. None of the students on that floor claimed to recognize him. The pranked student spent hours wandering the dorms, trying to figure out where his room was.
Saran wrap the toilet. Works great in communal bathrooms. Lift the seat, stretch the Saran-Wrap over the bowl (make sure there are no wrinkles), drop seat down. Works great in men’s restrooms, and even better in Women’s
Tape the faucets- Scotch tape over the spigot on the faucet of the sink or water fountain. when they turn on the water, it sprays water out to the side. If you aim it right you will get them in the crotch. Great for private bathrooms for faculty.
If your campus has a phone system that requires you to dial 9 for an outside line, leave someone a message on their answering machine pretending to be an administrator. Leave a “very important” message for them to call about something important (financial aid, possible suspension, criminal investigation, etc…). Leave the call back extension as “9911”. That equals “9” for outside line, “911” for the Police…
John Corrado, my friend Scott, a theater techie, helped out in an eerily similar prank at Bloomsburg University (PA). Only on this occasion it was over Christmas. Trust theater techies to pull this kind of stunt…
When I was at the University of Leeds (England) two of my friends broke into an annoying bloke’s flat the day after he left for Christmas. They spread grass seed over the floor, watered it, and came back periodically over the break to water it some more. By the time the guy came back, there was a half inch of grass growing on his carpet.
And, finally, a simple one from my dad, from his days as an engineering student at Penn State. (My dad? Pranks? You wouldn’t believe it if you saw him today, but…) Fill a long manila envelope with talcum powder. Stick the open end under somebody’s door. Grab both sides of the envelope and make a motion like squeezing a bellows, shooting the powder into the room. Instant fog!
Dorm trick:
Tape a sheet over your victim’s door (door has to open inward, BTW). Don’t do anything else, just cover the doorway with a sheet. Re-hang the sheet whenever he’s in his room for a few weeks, until it gets to the point where the victim simply walks through the sheet without bothering to tear it down. Then put a vending machine/fullsize refrigerator on the other side of the sheet.