Forget BowdoinMatch for a minute-before students started registering with the online matching service in droves, they took the Bowdoin Student Life Survey.
According to that study, not all Bowdoin students are looking for a match-64 percent said they desired a boyfriend or girlfriend, while 38 percent stated that they were already involved in some sort of relationship.
Conducted by the students of "Research and Social Activism," Professor Kristen Ghodsee's Women's Studies 301 course, the survey combined 421 responses and represented 27 percent of the 1,574 students currently on campus.
Respondents were asked 41 questions about student life and personal values. Topics included alcohol use, religion, activism, eating disorders, academic performance, and employment.
One of the survey's more notable results was that about one in every five Bowdoin students takes mood-altering or attention-enhancing prescription drugs.
"That does not surprise me, and I certainly see it as a pretty common phenomenon," said Director of the Counseling Service Bob Vilas. "There are more people coming to school with prescriptions than ever. A fair number use [those drugs] as prescribed, but people can also get their hands on them for recreational use."
"We do not keep those kinds of statistics at the Health Center, but between anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and ADD medications, it doesn't seem out of the ballpark," said Melissa Walters, mid-level provider at Dudley Coe Health Center.
Thirty-five percent said they used a "recreational" drug in the last month, and Vilas indicated that the figure was accurate. "It doesn't seem high at all," he said. "It's well in keeping with my experience. Sometimes it comes up as an issue with the students we talk to, or we might bring it up as a subject of concern."
Ghodsee said that drug use might be even more common than reported because some students feel uncomfortable answering "yes" to that type of question in an academic setting. "If anything, those may be underestimates," she said. "Some of the surveys were given out in my classes and in Professor [Jen] Scanlon's. Students may not have wanted to answer entirely honestly in those cases."
Most questions were presented in "Yes/No" format (for example, "Have you ever dated someone of another race at Bowdoin?" or "Would you consider yourself an activist?"). Ghodsee indicated that she believed most students answered the survey's questions honestly because it was anonymous.
"I think students were on the whole very honest with their responses," she said. "I have the benefit of having personally gone through nearly every one of the surveys as I entered them into the computer, and there were only a handful that looked as though someone had taken it as a joke."
Seventeen percent of respondents said they did not drink alcohol. Beer was the top choice for students who do imbibe-45 percent of the students surveyed drink it on the weekends. Twenty percent specified hard liquor as a drink of choice, seven percent chose wine, and 12 percent drink a combination of beer, wine, and hard liquor.
The survey also posed questions to students about their romantic relationships and habits. The women's studies class opted to let respondents define "hook up" for themselves in order to achieve a greater response rate to that particular question. Twenty-seven percent said they "hook up" only while sober, 21 percent are normally "a little tipsy," 28 percent are "heavily buzzed," 18 percent are "pretty trashed," and six percent are "totally wasted."
The individuals surveyed belonged to an average of two student groups or organizations, though there were significant numbers of students on either end of the distribution. Fifteen percent said they belonged to four or more student groups and 13 percent did not belong to any.