“It was hard going out with people I met in class or in my dorm,” Emily* recalls. “We’d go somewhere, and I’d pull out a stack of cash. It wouldn’t be more than $60, but it’d be all in wrinkled $1 bills, and it was kind of obvious where I got them.” Emily is an average fourth-year student at USC from a white, upper middle-class Southern family, but she has an icebreaker fact she doesn’t pull out at parties: For her first two years of school, Emily covered the costs of textbooks, food, housing and gas by stripping at a local Platinum Plus.

“I never had a horrific experience as a child,” she says, “but my parents and I aren’t close. They don’t pay for me, and when I started dancing, it paid for pretty much everything.”

Ever the cheap college student, I set out to see how long someone could live off only the free food served at campus organizational meetings. I searched around the university’s website and DailyGamecock.com for options, but it’s tough to figure out which organizations serve food based on websites, so it all comes down to guesswork and word-of-mouth. I got a little excited when I saw Student Media interest meetings, but judging by the skimpy schmucks who run Garnet and Black, I knew there wouldn’t be luck there. I started out feeling lost and hungry in a vague, phantom-like way; how I imagine indigenous Eskimos feel before the frost sets in. Pre-hungry. It would’ve been a long and barren winter, but friends, strangers and a student body treasurer came to my rescue.

I like what I’m seeing around campus this year: rollerblading in front of Russell, boys in neon windbreakers and girls with floral tights and scrunchies. On TV, there are reminders of childhood with the re-airing of classics including “Doug,” “Kenan and Kel” and “Clarissa Explains It All.” Facebook groups with names like “The ’90s Are All That” have hundreds of thousands of followers, and #MarkMcGwire and #BFFnecklaces are trending on Twitter. The 1990s are back in a big way, both in popular culture and at USC. With the graduation of the class of 2012, the last of the ’80s babies will move on, and this new generation of children born in the ’90s will officially rule the school (and, very soon, the world). These are what adults call “the best years of your life,” and given the breadth of technology and social networking at the ’90s generation’s disposal, it’s hard to argue this sentiment. And yet—what is it about Bel-Air, snapback caps and dreams of orange soda that inspire the students of tomorrow to turn to the past?

Feature: The Overachiever's Drug Culture