What your seating choice in a lecture hall says about you

Long story short, you don’t have any trauma other than the stuff higher education gives you. File Alex Vanderput

So you think a tarot card reading or a licensed psychologist or an astrologer can help you understand yourself and resolve all your ‘issues?' Please! I have all the skills of an ethnographic sociology student to do a deep psychoanalysis of you based on your seating choice in lecture — and before you start doubting my capabilities, yes, I have taken a single psychology class.

My credentials also include making all my ‘friends’ hate me because I clearly know too much for them to handle and making that one psychology prof tear their hair out because again, I clearly know too much for them to handle. If you like what you see — which you will — contact me on Venmo to pay my UBC tuition because I’m just that good.

If you sit somewhere in the first three rows

Depending on class size, you’re either really engaged and clever about it or lazy and failed to make a good choice. You’re scared of speaking up in a class full of people because of past childhood trauma of never being good enough so you sit up front so it feels like there are only 10 people in the class and you get those participation points. Or you’re just a nerd. Honestly, same.

If you sit at the back

You hate this class. Why are you in it. You come extra late to it. You hate all the nerds who sit in front. You hate the prof. Why are they in it. You just need this for your major requirement. It’s not like you care about your major anyway.

Or you’re very tall and/or sitting at the back and participating makes you feel like the most powerful person in the world because if you’re sitting at the back and participating, you sound like a god to everyone sitting up front who can’t see you and then you become, by default, the most powerful person in the microcosmic world of that lecture hall. Politics and life are intertwined, okay?

Or you just want to play Minecraft because you don’t actually care about the education you’re selling your internal organs for.

Long story short, you don’t have any trauma other than the stuff higher education gives you.

Somewhere in the middle

This reflects your middle-child trauma. You’re used to never being taken seriously. You will never be as much of a disappointment as the eldest child i.e. the backbencher and you will never be as angelic and destined for greatness as the youngest child i.e. the nerd. You’re probably used to feeling like a mediocre student who will never be good enough to become the next Santa Ono or to drop out and start a revolutionary billion-dollar corporate system that in the long-run will only deprive our world of any kind of life it ever had.

Somewhere on the sides

You don’t have any friends, do you? That’s the tough kind of trauma. Let me tell you what isn’t going to help. Sitting on the side on your own where you can’t interact with anyone else. That’s not how you make friends. Trust me, I got like a billion friends.

Corner of a row you sat on by accident

You now have to deal with the left-hand side table because you were too absent-minded to realize before you sat down and now the class has started and you’re too awkward to get up and look for a better seat to sit on. Lots of trauma.