The Weirdest College Traditions Around the World

College traditions can be perfectly ordinary. Graduation ceremonies, class rings, homecoming weekends, and throwing caps into the air all make sense.

And then there are universities where students jump into freezing seas at sunrise, race homemade rafts through river rapids, avoid supposedly cursed cobblestones, or cover each other in shaving foam.

Some of these traditions are centuries old. Others started as jokes and somehow became annual events. What they have in common is that they give universities their own strange little cultures — the kind of experiences that make perfect sense to students and sound completely ridiculous to everyone else.

Here are some of the more unusual college traditions found around the world.

St Andrews students have academic parents

At the University of St Andrews in Scotland, your university family can become surprisingly literal. Older students can “adopt” first-year students as their academic children, creating families that sometimes grow across generations of students.

The tradition is partly about mentorship. Academic parents help newer students meet people and adjust to university life. But eventually, things get considerably stranger.

The academic-family tradition culminates in Raisin Weekend. Historically, first-year students reportedly thanked their academic parents with a pound of raisins. Today, the weekend involves games, elaborate costumes, unusual challenges, and one particularly chaotic finale: a giant shaving-foam fight in St Salvator’s Quad. (University of St Andrews Shop)

Imagine explaining to someone that the people covering you in foam are technically your university parents.

There’s also a supposedly cursed patch of ground

St Andrews apparently decided one unusual tradition wasn’t enough.

Outside St Salvator’s Quad, the initials “PH” appear in the cobblestones, marking the location associated with Protestant reformer Patrick Hamilton. University folklore says students who step on the initials will be cursed and fail their degree. (St Andrews News)

Naturally, students have developed a solution.

On May 1, students participate in the May Dip, running into the North Sea around dawn. The tradition is associated with good luck in exams and, according to university folklore, can also break the Patrick Hamilton curse. (University of St Andrews)

So if you accidentally step on the wrong cobblestone, your academic future may apparently depend on a freezing early-morning swim.

College is stressful enough without supernatural academic consequences.

Uppsala students race homemade rafts down a river

At Uppsala University in Sweden, the arrival of spring is celebrated through Valborg, or the Last Day of April, one of the biggest events in the university calendar.

One of its most famous traditions is the Running of the Falls. Students build their own colorful rafts and send them down the Fyris River, including through two sets of falls. The tradition began in 1975 after two students decided to attempt the route themselves. (Uppsala University)

What started as two students experimenting with a questionable idea became a major annual spectacle.

And the rafting is only part of the day.

At exactly 3 p.m., the university’s vice-chancellor raises a white student cap outside Carolina Rediviva, the university library. Thousands of people gathered below respond by putting on or waving their own student caps, symbolically welcoming spring. (Uppsala University)

The celebrations also include picnics, traditional spring songs, lunches, parties, and the wonderfully named Champagne Gallop at student nations. (Uppsala University)

Your average end-of-semester pizza suddenly seems a little underwhelming.

At St Andrews, finishing your exams may get you soaked

Imagine walking out of the final exam of your undergraduate degree. You’re exhausted, relieved, and probably thinking about food or sleep.

Then your friends appear and throw water all over you.

This is another St Andrews tradition known as “soakings.” Friends wait for students completing their final undergraduate exam and celebrate by showering them with cold water. The university describes it as a way of marking the end of the examination period. (University of St Andrews)

It’s essentially the academic version of a sports team dumping a cooler over its coach.

After years of lectures, essays, deadlines, and exams, perhaps getting soaked is as reasonable a graduation-adjacent celebration as anything else.

Some traditions are really elaborate inside jokes

What makes college traditions fascinating isn’t necessarily how old they are.

A tradition can begin because two students built a raft, because people developed a superstition around a piece of pavement, or because an old gift of raisins gradually transformed into a weekend involving costumes and shaving foam.

Then new students arrive and participate because previous students did it. A few years later, those students introduce the tradition to another generation.

Eventually, something that would look completely bizarre anywhere else becomes perfectly normal within that university.

That’s how traditions survive.

They give students a shared language and a set of memories that belong specifically to that place. Someone who attended St Andrews immediately understands what “Raisin Weekend” means. Someone who studied in Uppsala knows what happens on the last day of April.

The weirdness is partly what makes the memory stick.

The best traditions turn a university into a community

From the outside, university traditions can look silly, outdated, or completely inexplicable. Sometimes that’s precisely their appeal.

College brings together thousands of people who may have very little in common when they arrive. Shared rituals give them something that connects one class to another.

You graduate, move somewhere else, start working, and eventually forget plenty of ordinary days from university.

You probably won’t remember every Tuesday lecture.

But you might remember standing beside a river watching your friends attempt to navigate rapids on something they built themselves. You might remember running into the North Sea before breakfast or emerging from your final exam only to have your friends dump water over your head.

The strangest college traditions aren’t necessarily the most practical.

That’s probably why people keep them.