Conferences are great: you don’t have to deal with the anonymity of the 200-person lecture hall and you really get to know your fellow students in an intimate setting. But at a certain point, you realize the same characters appear in every conference. Here’s a breakdown of the kids you’re going to hang out with, once a week, for the rest of your McGill career.

The TA: For those with power fetishes, this is the fabulously attractive sex god who is only looking at you when he tells his students to go see him during office hours.

The tangent-pusher: This guy has obviously not done the readings. He hasn’t said a word for the first 35 minutes, then jumps in on the first tangent that comes up and drags it along as far as he can until the end of class. Next thing you know, everyone’s talking about the viability of duck exchanges during a discussion about Hobbes.

The bored-yet-chatty: The person who knows he’s stuck in conference for another 15 minutes, and is going to make it interesting by bringing everything back to The Godfather or Sarah Palin.

The attendance mark seeker: They show up for the 1 per cent attendance grade, but doodle/BBM/play Tetris the whole time.

The hipster/weird guy: Your initial reaction was to label this guy as a hipster because of the handlebar mustache, but as the semester progresses, you realize he’s just weird.  

The girl who comes from the country you are studying: Because of her, you don’t talk. There is no way you are insulting the Mother Land.

The guy who comes from the country you are studying: We get it Comrade, you were born in communist Russia. But the rest of your Russian politics class doesn’t care that you remember when Yelstin got plastered on that flight in 1993.

The ridiculous vocabulary user: “My visceral response, ergo, concurrently, vis a vis the a priori system constraints, per se.” What? Did that sentence even have a verb?

The idiot: This person’s comments are mind blowing. “But like, how does the writer know that God made people equal? Like how can he just write that?”

The guy who hasn’t shown up until the seventh conference: He’ll probably get a better mark than you anyway.

These are just a sampling of the kids you’re going to see over and over in each conference. There’s still the TA’s pet, the foreign exchange student with the crazy accent, and the girl who makes everyone look bad because she does all the readings for every class. Get used to these kids and enjoy how hilarious they are; they’re not going anywhere.