The Sandbox

Kevin Bowman, a freshman year college student, had gone out to a party on Friday, November 2, 2016, and never made it back to his dorm room.
“He was on the floor for 5 hours before anyone said anything,” said Margo Bowman in a phone interview, speaking of her then 18 year old son.
Bowman had just finished his first semester of college. Before the incident, his mother had reportedly noticed changes in her son’s behavior. He had more than a few absences from class, his grades were uncharacteristically slipping, and he had started going out on school nights.
She had not anticipated the call she received on March 5th, 2016, however.
Kevin had fallen down the stairs at a frat party. He had been binge drinking, friends estimated he had about 10 beers and a few shots of vodka.
Witnesses at the party reportedly said that a few people commented on his state of unconsciousness, but were prompted by the fraternity house owners to let him “sleep it off”.
Bowman, along with thousands of college students, found alcohol abuse to be fatal within the first three years of college.

Accidents like this happen more often than most think. These horror stories become many families nightmares when binge drinking and carelessness are a huge part of the “college experience”.
About 1,825 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die from alcohol-related unintentional injuries, including motor-vehicle crashes.
Early Sunday morning, The College of New Jersey students found themselves in a similar situation. Michael Sot, 20 years old and a sophomore math major, lost his life to a drunk driver shuttling five friends home from a party, according to TCNJ President Kathryn A. Foster in an email sent out to all TCNJ students and faculty.
The whole community is in a state of grieving. The streets and walkways of the TCNJ campus are almost barren, and a prominent sadness is visible on the faces of most students. At the scene of the incident, there are balloons in remembrance of the life tragically lost.
“It’s a sad situation. I didn’t even know him personally, but it’s had a huge affect on everyone,” said TCNJ freshman Chloe Sena in an in-person interview.
Sena continued, “There have been a lot of posts for him. I see people from different grades and schools showing their outrage. I think that it will wake people up, here at least.”
According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, almost 60 percent of college students ages 18-22 drank alcohol in the past month, and almost 2 out of 3 of them engaged in binge drinking during that same timeframe.
Students even go as far as to take pride in blacking out from alcohol poisoning, using phrases like “died in the pregame” that have more literal meaning than implied.
This is because drinking is considered an important aspect of the “college experience”. People have preconceived notions of what college is supposed to be like and go into college with already prominent drinking habits. It is perceived as the ‘cool thing to do’ and most people go along with it for the social clout. What students are not considering, however, is the inevitable impacts of drinking.
Students are aware of the physical implications of alcohol abuse, and continue to ignore them, but not as many are aware of the mental effects.
About 1 in 4 college students report academic consequences from drinking, including missing class, falling behind in class, doing poorly on exams or papers, and receiving lower grades overall.
“I had no idea alcohol impacted my grades. I would’ve done a lot better if I hadn’t binge drank my way through college,” says Ramapo College Alumna, Annie Young in an in-person interview.
Young is just one of many students who did not realize the consequences of alcohol abuse while working at their college degree.
Poor grades are often mistaken as the product of not understanding the class, the teacher doing their job poorly, or just plain laziness. However, that is not the case in most situations. It is the staying up late, not feeling well enough to go to class, and losing focus on school itself that has the fatal impacts on students’ academic performance.
Not only does binge drinking have a negative impact on academic performance, but it has proven time and time again to be a selfish act. Not only can one inflict heartbreaking injuries on themselves and others, but it has been proven that even students who do not drink, but live with a roommate who does, suffer lower grades and GPAs because their roommate keeps them up at night.
Alexa Calero, a freshman at TCNJ, has experienced this first hand as she states in an in-person interview, “I can’t count the amount of times my roommate has come in the room at 2 A.M. drunk, making as much noise as she can and waking me up. I end up not being able to pay attention in my classes the next day because I’m so tired. I’ve even slept through one or two of them on accident because of it.”
The studies of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism also show about 696,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are assaulted by another student who has been drinking.
Kayla Miller, a freshman at the University of Rhode Island, can vouch for this. She said in an in-person interview, “I was at a party like any other weekend, and some girl just came up to me and hit me. There was no clear reason as to why she did it, but she left me with a black eye.”
Alcohol induced violence goes much further than a black eye, however. About 97,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 report experiencing alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape.
This is a problem that students are aware about, but still manage to push it to the back of their minds.
“You never think it will happen to you. Like I know not to leave my cup or take drinks from other people, but in the moment you’re not thinking that,” said Megan Stanczak during an in-person interview, a junior at Quinnipiac University.
Stanczak had left her cup on a table at a party the first semester of her junior year. She said she had only been gone for a minute, but when she went to drink from her cup she noticed the liquid had become cloudy.
These college student nightmares are realities for thousands of students across the United States, and they have only gotten worse as colleges do little to refute the ongoing issues.
Many college campuses, for example Susquehanna University and Elmira University, have deemed themselves dry campuses, meaning there is no alcohol permitted anywhere on campus, but generally do not crack down on their ruling as students continue to party and suffer the inevitable consequences.
Other colleges, like Rutgers University and Pennsylvania State University, have gone as far as disbanding fraternities for offenses, most commonly rape (in a drunken state), and refuse to recognize their organizations.
However, those fraternities go “underground”, or in other words, resume their activities off campus and continue to inflict damage on those participating in the drinking culture college has created.
According to Shayla Rodriguez, a freshman at Rutgers University, students have stopped receiving emails that reports the assaults and injuries on campus because there was too many to report. When a fellow student was hit by a car on campus, she had to find out through other students what had happened, though she was reportedly “not at all surprised”.
Students are careless and free to do as they please as long as no one is enforcing stricter drinking policies, and the amount death and injuries due to binge drinking and alcohol abuse has only increased in recent years.
For students like Bowman, a strong no-tolerance alcohol policy could have been the difference between life and death.
In her last remarks, Margo Bowman said, “I need to see change. This is a problem that’s never going to go away and continue to devastate more families if someone doesn’t get up and do something.”