Lazy College Senior

About

Lazy College Senior is an advice animal image macro series featuring a young man with short disheveled brown hair drinking a pint of beer. The images are typically captioned with unmotivated statements or behaviors that are associated with burnt out college students during their final year of school, a phenomenon commonly known as “senioritis.”^[5] The character can be seen as the antithesis of College Freshman.

Origin

The original image comes from a stock photo found on Photos.com^[2] titled "Young Man Drinking Beer At Outdoor Pub" (shown left). The first instance of the series surfaced on November 7th, 2011, when Redditor ikfotsur submitted an image macro titled "Lazy college senior"^[3] with the caption "5 minutes late to class / skip entire day" (shown right). The post reached the front page of the r/adviceanimals subreddit, accumulating 9,602 up vote and 510 comments prior to being archived.

The picture is rumored to have been taken at the Highlander Pub in Ottawa, Canada. In March of 2012, Redditor Areean submitted a Google Street View screenshot^[19] of the location, noting that the outdoor chairs and tables at the pub matches those seen in the stock photo.

Spread

On November 9th, 2011, the same instance submitted to Reddit was posted on the Cheezburger site Memebase. On November 10th, compilations of Lazy College Senior images were posted to the Internet humor sites #1 Meme^[6] and The Bigster.^[7] Two days later, the viral content site BuzzFeed^[14] posted several notable derivatives in a post titled "Lazy College Senior Meme." On November 14th, the "Fuck Yeah Lazy College Senior" single topic Tumblr^[10] blog was launched. The same day, the Internet humor site UpRoxx^[15] published a post about the series, including a slideshow of examples.

Also on November 14th, BodyBuilding Forum^[16] user cocaine_emotion submitted several examples of the series in a post titled “New Meme – Lazy college senior – upper year college brahs GTFIH.” On March 30th, 2012, the @LazySeniorMeme Twitter account was created, which tweeted captions from the advice animal series.

Doesn't do the reading. Dominates class discussion

— Lazy College Senior(@LazySeniorMeme) March 30, 2012

The meme has continued to spread on sites like FunnyJunk^[12], Pinterest^[17] and Tumblr^[9] under the tage "#lazy college senior." As of May 9th, 2012, there are over 1,400 related threads on Reddit^[4], the Quickmeme^[1] page has over 23,000 submissions and a Facebook^[13] page has received over 7,500 likes.

Identity

The identity of the man in the photo is currently unknown. On January 31st, 2012, additional photographs of the model were submitted to the /r/LadyBoners^[18] subreddit by user jizznia. In the post, jizznia claimed that the model was wearing the same ring as the man in the original Lazy College Senior photo.

Notable Examples

Derivative: Lazy Elementary School Kid

On May 11th, 2012, Redditor Ignite_My_Paradigm submitted an image macro of a young boy reminiscent of Lazy College Senior jokes (shown below, left) to the /r/AdviceAnimals subreddit in a post titled "Lazy Elementary School Kid." The post spawned at least seven additional image macros on the same day. However, the series remained virtually unknown until September 18th when Redditor SilverMars submitted an instance featuring the caption "Story must be 1-2 pages? 1 page it is," (shown below, right) echoing Lazy College Senior's rounding-down of minimum length requirement for his paper assignment.

Redditor SilverMars' post was well-received within the subreddit, gaining more than 1,600 up votes and spawning nearly 30 derivative images in the first 72 hours.

Search Interest

Search query volume for "lazy college senior" rose rapidly in November of 2011 after the first image macro was posted on Reddit.

External References