Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
[Contextualisation, for the others]
OP is talking about what's called "trote" or "praxe" in Portuguese. It goes from a genuine welcome party to hazing; it depends a lot on the uni and the grad. From personal observations, hazing is way more common in Medicine and the engineering grads; and hazing is banned in plenty unis, under threat of expulsion.
My experiences in both grads (Chemistry and Letras*) were rather good. In both the common element was the toll, where freshmen and veterans organise themselves to beg money on the streets for booze, with painted faces. Then everyone drinks together, and the ones who don't drink alcohol can drink soda instead, nothing is forced.
In Chemistry the veterans were prone to a few practical pranks, but nothing abusive, like:
Then as a Chemistry veteran I helped with the toll. It was mostly making sure that the freshmen were safe, happy, and hydrated, or redirecting them to better crossroads (higher traffic, lower speed). Then getting drunk and babbling about the Celtic culture with one of the freshmen.
As a Letras freshman, I actually helped more from the veterans' side of the things than begging myself money, given that I already had some experience with this. Then spent quite a bit of time taking care of another freshman, who had too much booze and was crying "nooo I drunk too much, and my mum is coming to take me back home, what if she sees me drunk?" (she simply laughed it off).
*Letras ("letters") is a typical Latin American grad including linguistics, translation, and literary criticism.
**"azoto" is a valid name for nitrogen in Portuguese, but it's almost never used where I live. The veteran exploited that to make atmospheric dinitrogen sound fancy. 80% dinitrogen = air.
I forgot to mention the mud bath. Back then people would check if they were admitted to the uni by either the TV or going to the campus; and the veterans readied a big pool of mud for the freshmen. I was already aware of that so I was wearing old clothes, and even joined the vets who were drinking wine ("a true chemist likes alcohol!" or something like this). Note that nobody threw me in mud, they only said "jump, jump, jump!"
They did throw me in the mud as a veteran though. But that was the folks from my own year.