It’s a pleasant Tuesday afternoon, and A.J.’s latte in hand, you’ve just settled in the Heritage Room with a stack of research articles. Time to knock out a couple pages of that essay. You’re just turning on your favorite study playlist when the inevitable happens — a prospie tour enters the room.

Suddenly a zoo animal on display, you scramble to remember how to match the marketing materials you pored over in high school. You’re studious, conservative, and intellectual… right?

Here are 10 ways to look like a Hillsdale student, lest the prospies find you out.

1. Frown at your laptop and sit up straight. You’re obviously concentrating on the greatest intellectual concerns of the 21st century: better look like it. Forget about the “C” you got in eighth-grade acting. Your expression totally looks natural. 
2. Smooth your hair. They always pick attractive students for brochures. That grown-out haircut is not doing you any favors. 
3. Take a long, profoundly meditative sip of latte. 
4. Shoot — you just dribbled coffee on your crewneck. Quick, cover it up, whispering “self-government” to yourself as you cast a furtive glance in the prospies’ direction.
5. Accidentally make eye contact with a prospie. Dive into a research article with a little too much haste.
6. Realize your Bluetooth earbuds didn’t connect, and you’ve been playing the “Lord of the Rings” soundtrack for the whole Heritage Room to hear. You hate those jerks who do that. Pause your music with ferocity.
7. Glance around and notice how many exhausted seniors are casting disapproving looks in your direction. And the prospies definitely noticed. Whatever. 
8. Take a deep breath and return to the research article. Read the same paragraph six times before you remember to concentrate. 
9. Type a paragraph on your Harry-Styles-stickered laptop, gazing off into the distance between sentences. Then realize you spelled your own name wrong in that email you sent to your new faculty adviser. Well, guess it’s time to switch majors again.
10. Remember once more to frown intellectually, just in time for the prospie tour to leave the Heritage Room. You totally fooled them… right?