TODAY 1602 freshman will begin their first day of class. Now that it's too late for these fresh young minds to avoid the four-year transformation into the class of 1990, it's time to talk about the dark side of freshman life.

Sixteen hundred freshmen implies 1600 freshman stories. Some are funny; most are ordinary. Once in a rare while a freshman story will embody the absolute essence of mortal terror and existential nausea, a crash dive into the dark firmament of human life. In these stories the inscription above Dexter Gate reads not "Enter to grow in wisdom," but instead "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

I am talking about freshman hell, an almost indescribable experience that affects everyone differently. Some of those who pass through Harvard's Hellgate drown themselves in a synapseblowing miasma of drugs and alcohol. Others slit their wrists, or jump off Anderson Bridge.

Freshman hell. My story is one of these.

The elements of freshman hell emerge equally from the individual and from the University--an unfortunate mix of the normal anxieties of adolescence and the sadistic impersonality of this place. If you're emotionally vulnerable, personally naive, or just unlucky, Harvard will chew you up and spit you out like the insignificant piece of teen-age gristle you are.

A complete exposition of my frosh disasters would be only slightly longer than War and Peace, so I will just touch on the highlights, the "Nine Circles of Freshman Hell" that await the unwary traveler. True, I missed out on three of the circles; perhaps that's why I am still around to tell the tale.

Circle 1. Pre-Med Hell

Despite the nasty reputation of the pre-med requirements, taking the Fatal Five courses doesn't qualify as an admission into hell unless you hate science, hate medicine, and don't want to go to med school. I was banished to this circle by my father, who asked me "What am I paying $16,000 a year for if you're not going to become a doctor?"

Harvard's unnecessarily irritating and competitive basic science courses can wear one down to a human parody that babbles biochemical formulas under the breath and has nightmares about flatworm phyla.

My sojourn in this circle began every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8:45 a.m., when Quasimodo climbed the bell tower of Memorial Church and rang the Chem 20 bell. Twenty minutes later, I passed though the entrance of the first circle--coincidentally the entrance to the Science Center--and spent an hour of my valuable time copying blurred illustrations that upon later examination looked like the drunken scribblings of a dyslexic orangutang. Everyone knows that the dyslexic orangutang was never going to score above the median, and since the crafty simian had exchanged his notes for mine, I was in for a tough time. Orgo lab second semester could have been called "Fun with Carcinogens." Every chemical I touched is even now burrowing deep inside my genes, doing who knows what mischief to my cellular structure.

My math class was taught by a prof who combined the intellectual clarity of Immanuel Kant with the accent of Sgt. Schulz. This professor liked to verbally footnote his lectures, and as the semester wore on he dwelled at length on the logical niceties of increasingly obscure proofs, often forgetting to explain what he was trying to prove.

Circle 2. GPA Hell

The sad cases wandering through this zone are all smart people who do the work and the reading and are interested in their classes, and habitually get screwed over by careless section leaders and ossified professors. Science majors are pretty sheltered from GPA hell, since there is usually a right way and a wrong way in science, with the right way getting the A.

Things are not so simple in liberal arts land. To get trapped in the GPA inferno, you typically have something original and interesting enough to say on exams and papers to get the grader flustered, but you are not thorough enough to impress with footnotes in the original Sanskrit. Neither a bullshit artist, a workaholic, nor a genius, the soul in this circle sees his papers and exams as an endless string of B-plusses, while the operators one floor up in GPA heaven thumb their noses and jangle their Phi Beta Kappa keys at the brighter minds below.

Circle 3. Solitaire Hell