Before this year, I wasn’t a huge fan of chips. I mean, they were good, but they weren’t something I went out of my way for, and I never had them around. When I moved into my house this year, I was able to ignore the bags of chips stocked in our open kitchen for a while. But as the year went on, the constant supply of chips kept tempting me, and I’d sneak a Barbecue Pop Chip here, a Hawaiian Maui Sweet Onion Chip there. Now, every time I go down to get a drink of water, I can’t help myself from taking one or two of those addictive Tapatío Fritos, maybe following up with a Nancy’s Pita Chip.

Some might say this is just me having less self control. I prefer to think of it as the mere exposure effect in action. No, I’m not making this up; the mere exposure effect is scientific and everything. It says that people tend to develop preferences for things merely by being exposed to them often, so in my case, my newfound attraction to chips was obviously due to the fact that the chips kept exposing themselves to me. It’s all on them.

Of course, those chips would never have come into my life if I hadn’t chosen to draw into Jerry, so maybe it is on me a little. Unfortunately, I have to graduate and won’t be able to enter the Draw this year and draw into a place where I won’t be tempted by chips, but for all you freshmen, sophomores and juniors, what a fun, sexy time for you! (Well, if you’re not drawing Tier 3.) You get to choose who you want to live with; you get to fantasize about life in a shiny new dorm/house; you get to rank things.

You’re also choosing who you’re going to be hanging out with next year, in a way. For most people, the dorm/house is going to be a place where you spend a lot of time. You sleep there, do work there, play there and eat there. So does everyone else in the dorm, so you’re going to see these people pretty often. You might have a lot of friends living in other houses that you can visit and eat or study with, but are you really going to do that every night, especially when it’s raining and cold? Probably not. So you eat in your house, you talk to whoever’s there and you become friends (or at least become friendly) with them.

Bam! Mere exposure effect! Well, sort of. Merely being exposed to the same person in your house over and over probably isn’t going to make you love them if everything they do annoys the heck out of you and you think they’re the worst person in the world. But for everyone else in your house, as you keep seeing them and as you keep going to house events with them and as you keep having dinnertime conversations with them, you’ll start to figure out who you like hanging out with more than others, who you share the most in common with.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you would have a 100-percent compatibility rating or anything like that; they might be the best match for you in your house, but in a world of almost seven billion people, there’s almost certainly someone out there who would be a “better” match. Heck, even just at Stanford, there are probably people you haven’t had the chance to meet who you’d probably really like. When it’s put that way, it seems pretty unfair that something that’s mostly out of your hands like housing assignments can have a significant influence on who your friends are, a pretty big aspect of who you are.

But I think that while we already recognize this, we also don’t really care as much as we could, because it’s almost impossible to walk around here without bumping into someone awesome. Maybe that super cool kid in your hall isn’t 100-percent compatible with you, but he’s still pretty super cool, as are most of the people in the hall. As you keep seeing them and getting to know them, you might end up being pretty happy that you ended up where you did.

And regardless of what happens in the Draw, try to make the most of wherever you end up next year. Go to dorm events, leave your door open, go to meals and talk to people! I’m apartment hunting myself right now, and it’s making me realize how much I’m going to miss living with a whole house of fascinating people and regret the times that I didn’t take advantage of it.

And don’t fight the mere exposure effect. You can’t beat science. Especially when science is in the form of Tapatío Fritos.
Tim needs to find healthy snacks as tasty as Tapatío Fritos to expose himself to so that he can wean himself off of those devil sticks. Send him your favorites at [email protected].