Student Spotlight: Kid With Blindingly Orange Hair in Your Morning Lecture

For many college students, early morning routines share various similarities: snoozing the alarm about five times, coffee that tastes like battery acid, and arriving at your morning lecture mentally unstable but physically present.

One person, however, breaks this mold.

Sitting right in the front of the class, violating FAA lighting regulations, is the kid with blinding orange hair. Not just a ginger. Not orange dyed hair. Nuclear traffic cone orange. Scientists are still working to find out how their hair is so abrasive that your retinas sting days later.

You know nothing about them except for one thing: when they walk into the lecture hall, the professor is forced to dim the projector because of the mini sun sitting in the front row.

This person is visible from every seat. Back row? Blinded. Balcony? Blinded. It is so bad that even while watching the recorded lecture, the orange glow overwhelms your vision.

Most students develop a routine around them. When they wake up late and are groggily dragging themselves to class, they look for the beacon, like a ship looking for a lighthouse. When they’re absent, the room feels as cold and dark as a late winter night. Morale plummets. Reportedly, many students get lost after not being able to locate the glow.

Despite the overwhelming visual strain they give, they remain an enigma. Always early. Always in the front row. Just sitting there, silently radiating the energy of a traffic cone left far too close to a nuclear reactor.

You desire their unbridled confidence that they have to become the brightest object in a 700+ seat lecture hall. You wonder if they know that half the class dissociates staring into the light.

As someone who can only observe the light, it is important to appreciate the academic lighthouse: they guide us, blind us, and deal permanent damage to our circadian rhythm.