Blog Post #9

MY ARGUMENT:
My argument is quite simple. I wanted to explore what drives students to binge drink. Since binge drinking is such a huge issue among young students, figured if someone could pinpoint a reason, or influence that causes students to engage in this risky behavior, that leads to student death. According to sources I found, my argument is that, since, according to research, members of fraternities often engage in binge drinking. I believe that many young college student are impressionable, many freshman do not know what it is like to live on their own and most freshman need to make new friends. A common way to make friends in college is to attend parties. Many fraternities have parties where anyone can come in and socialize with others. I believe that students enter a fraternity party and observe the environment around them, and see the majority of the fraternity members participating in binge drinking. The student now perceives drinking this excessive amount is normal, and will want to engage in the same drinking behavior. Leading to unfortunate outcomes for some students.

COUNTER-ARGUMENT:
The counter-argument for my claim was they author believed that students that engage in binge drinking, not because they see fraternities making it a social norm, but college is a placed where some students just can not handle how hard the workload is, some people do have have the money, some students become full of anxiety with their growing student loan debt, and some students cannot make friends so they're struggling with being alone. All or any one of those factors can lead a student down a dark path. Since alcohol is technically a depressant, if a student is depressed, they will drink excessively to attempt to feel better. Students attempt to drink their problems away, to try to numb the mental stress, and pain. After the student is done excessively binge drinking, the depressing emotions are still there, then the student will want to drink again, leading the student to endure a cycle of binge drinking behavior. 

Each side has a completely different hypothesis to why students engage in binge drinking during college. My claim believes that fraternities are the main influence; however, the counter-argument claims that students engage in binge drinking with stress/depression being the main influence. Both see there is definitely a problem with alcohol consumption, by using similar terms such as binge drinking.