According to the Core Institute, one night of heavy drinking can impair your ability to think abstractly for up to 30 days, limiting your ability to relate textbook reading to what your professor says or to think through a football play.

It also states that 159,000 of today’s first-year college students will drop out of school next year because of alcohol- or other drug-related reasons. This is because the average student spends $900 on alcohol each year.

It’s heard walking to and from classes, in our dorm halls, and even seen on our Facebook walls on a daily or weekly basis. The infatuation with some students getting drunk on the weekends seems to increase once they enter college.

Weekends no longer begin on a Friday or Saturday evening. Instead they begin on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, risking academic success for a few hours of unsupervised fun.

It could only take one cigarette to become addicted to nicotine and it could take just one drink to become addicted to alcohol. And both of these are equally difficult to stop.

The reasons that brought every freshman, sophomore, junior, senior and graduate student here has been altered from an emphasis on getting their education to getting their next fix of their newfound addiction.

Read the Daily during the beginning of the week and look for the police reports. You’ll find that almost every entry involves alcohol, from public intoxication to charges for underage possession and public intoxication.

Now if you’re a freshman, and you’ve been here since August, that means you may have gotten a whole two-and-a-half months into college and have already been arrested or have gotten in trouble in some way. I’m sure the parents will be proud.

Calling yourself a “social drinker” is not an excuse, either. Social drinkers may drink regularly, but they do not get drunk. Also a social drinker does not show evidence of addiction to alcohol. So if the purpose of your weekend is to become drunk, you are not a social drinker, even if you only drink on the weekends.

How does permanent damage to vital organs, cancer, gastrointestinal irritations, malnutrition, nutritional deficiencies, sexual dysfunctions, high blood pressure, lowered resistance to disease and dying approximately 26 years earlier sound to you? It’s the package deal that comes with heavy drinking on a regular basis in the long run.

Although it may appear that things may not be serious, or perhaps you aren’t addicted, think again. What is your primary motive for going out on the weekend? Is alcohol necessary this time, or can you do without?

Believe it or not, there are options other than partying as forms of entertainment for a weekend. See a movie, grab a slice of pizza or clean your messy room. All of these are alcohol-free and just as entertaining — well, minus the room cleaning.

My aim is to encourage the underage students of this campus to steer clear of alcohol at least until the law says you’re legal to make your own decisions regarding it. I also encourage you to advise the students whom the law says are able to drink to make smarter decisions concerning their use.

We come to college with the perception that these will be the best years of our lives, and when we become focused on attending parties with the intention of getting drunk, we aren’t making memorable experiences. We are actually drinking so much that the past weekend can’t be remembered at all.

— Justine Hain is a freshman in pre-journalism and mass communication from Rochester, Minnesota.