With the majority of freshers’ weeks nationwide having drawn to a close, the HSE has released some preliminary information from a study they have been conducting on the freshness of freshers.
The study, which is currently ongoing, has found that only 14% of freshers made it from Monday to Friday without committing a certain numbers of acts that are deemed to be “unfresh” by those conducting the research.
There are many different acts that researchers consider to be unfresh, but different acts have different levels of freshness-impact. For example, those who vomit but continue on to have a successful night out will not be affected as much as those whose nights are ended by such an act. Those who attempt to continue on and fail will also have to deal with an extended period of reputation recuperation, having now established themselves as a complete state.
A multitude of variables, such as number of alcoholic units consumed, frequency of showers, and number of regrettable shifts are all factored into a complicated algorithm that then tells us a student’s level of freshness.
The overwhelming majority of freshers have scored low on what the researchers refer to as the “Dignity Scale”. Only 14% of those studied so far have been considered more fresh than unfresh, one of the lowest national rates on record. The majority of those that did score fresh were either mature students or foreign students, with some possibly coming from as far away as France.