It’s that time of year again, when the flowers start to bloom, the insects start to bite, and the prospies come.

There are about a zillion prospies here these days. Clearly, they will not all decide to come to Pomona, and this is a good thing. If they all came, the current housing shortage would be even worse, classes would be crowded, and so on. We must cull the herd.

Just about every one of these prospies has already been accepted here. If they like their visit, they will be in your dining hall and on your campus come September.

You have a chance to make yourself an unofficial member of the board of admissions. If there is a prospie that you don’t think would contribute to the Pomona community, you have the right and the obligation to scare him away. There are several ways to do this.

You can abandon your prospie in the Borg basement. By the time he finds his way out, it will be too late for him to mail in his forms. Don’t worry, he is unlikely to die unless he is too slow to catch spiders.

Play some harmless practical jokes on your prospie, like urinating on him in the middle of the night. In the morning, insist that it never happened and must have been a bad dream brought on by a combination of dining hall food and severe jet lag. Then introduce your prospie all day as "<Insert Prospie’s Name> of the Weak Bladder."

Next, let your prospie see what kinds of activities you are involved in. Take them to the Freemason meeting in Mason.

Whenever you pass Walker, say, "Walker? I don’t even know her!" Laugh hysterically and pound your prospie on the back.

It goes without saying that you should make the prospie sleep on the floor. Tell them that Pomona is too stingy to buy mattresses, and that you had to bring all of your own furniture to college.

Constantly evangelize the prospie with the religion of your choice. Promise them that they will go to Hell if they do not convert. Ideally you should baptize them with goat’s blood when they are not paying attention. If you can get your hands on some Hare Krishna robes, try to get your entire sponsor group to dance around chanting "hare-hare-hare." Even if you’re not a freshman, gather up your ex-sponsor group. You get extra points if you meet your prospie at the airport dressed in such a way and ask for spare change.

Of course there are many other ways to dress. The classic is to pretend to be a nudist. If you spend all of prospie week nude, you are likely to scare away undesirables.

Note: this tactic does not work if you are very physically attractive. If you suspect this may be the case, wear a wetsuit continuously and dive into every fountain you pass. Pretend to be looking for sunken treasure.

Another way to drive away prospies is to load them up with drugs and alcohol. Odds are that if you send them to the hospital they won’t want to come here.

However, this strategy can backfire, since a surprisingly large number of prospies see a college visit as an opportunity to get trashed. Worst of all, the prospies that enjoyed spending their college visit throwing up are exactly the ones that I don’t want to come.

If you are not having any success scaring away the prospie, go after their parents. Parents are much easier to shock. The typical protective mother wouldn’t dream of letting her baby go to Pomona after she was hit in the face with a few cream pies.

You can also just entertain yourself with tour groups. Although your antics are not targeted, they can be more bizarre because you don’t have to sustain them for longer than it takes for the tour to walk down your hallway.

As a matter of fact, I heard that last year someone would take all his empty alcohol bottles and strew them on the floor around himself and then pretend to be dead drunk. The problem with this is that you have a hard time making yourself stand out from all the other people passed out in the hall.

Pranks involving farm animals are not funny. One way for a sponsor group to entertain a tour group is to pretend to be a group of terrorists seizing control of the hallway. Be sure to use real guns and live ammo to be convincing.

Your role as a Pomona student is not simply to drive away less desirable students; it as also to attract students admitted to colleges ranked higher than Pomona on the US News list.

If we can get more of them, we are likely to move up. Then, by moving up, we will be more likely to get the better students in a self-reinforcing spiral. If you convince a student admitted to the Pomona College of the East Coast, you get five hundred points. Maybe someday we will be rid of those horrendous T-shirts.

In addition to trying to convince smart prospies to attend Pomona, you should also try to get attractive people to come. The school always needs more of them. And that, of course, is yet another reason why magazine rankings are useless. They totally fail to take into account the beauty of each school’s student body.

If everyone follows this advice, then this time next year we will have a much improved student body. Since some absurd percentage of the school eventually ends up marrying other Pomona people, admissions controls can serve as a form of disorganized eugenics.

By breeding the best applicants and by preferentially letting in students whose relatives went here we can mold the genetics of the Pomona population. Then, after a few dozen generations, we will be able to create the perfect student body. With a little help from the new Keck Graduate Institute we may be able to cut that time considerably through various genetic manipulations. Then we can enter Pomona into a Brave New World at the head of the US News list.