Anxiety 101 : Welcome to dorm life in 1994. It’s a time of humility, communal bathrooms and, of course,panicked calls to home.

UCLA freshman Myisha Battey calls her mother in South-Central Los Angeles every day to tell her about her new world, about life with the kind of roommate who announces that she’s having a shoe dilemma. Battey is plagued by worries that spread like a bad cold through her dorm: Can she keep up? Will she feel comfortable? “I don’t want to get to class and seem intimidated,” she says.

Down the hall, freshman Devin Senelick from Napa grapples with another crisis: anonymity. “When you don’t know anybody, you can introduce yourself,” he says. “They don’t know who you used to hang out with or the mistakes you’ve made.”

One floor below, a Huntington Beach sophomore rethinks her first night in the dorm after a male acquaintance pounded on the door and her roommate let him in. The two of them tussled on the bed; then the roommate repeatedly ordered the man to leave. The sophomore remained quiet, her heart pounding, wondering: “Oh my God. Is this date rape?”

This is one week in the life of a college dorm. It is a time of humility, walking down the hall to the floor’s communal bathroom every morning, clad in your robe amid total strangers. It is a time of dire consequences, calling your mother to send a new dress for a sorority rush party. It is a time of apprehension, walking to your classrooms on the giant campus a day ahead simply so you’ll know how to get there.

For anyone who graduated in the ‘60s or ‘70s, college is now stunningly different--and, in some respects, so are today’s students, fed by microwave ovens and MTV. The Class of 1998, which has never used a rotary telephone, has dorm rooms filled with VCRs and computers, CD players and beepers.

Life in this dorm--Dykstra Hall, home to 877 men and women, most of them freshmen--is a caldron of anxiety. Students, male and female, are advised not to walk alone at night and to use the campus escorts. Self-defense classes are jammed. Because of concern about drinking, fraternity and sorority rushes are dry. Because of concern about sexually transmitted diseases, dorm dispensing machines offer condoms alongside the mini-boxes of detergent.

This is a generation so new that its members take pains to tell you that they are not a part of Generation X, the twentysomething crowd sagging under the stereotypes of Angst and apathy. That label falls just short of being repugnant, they say.

“We don’t identify with Generation X--they portray themselves as hapless and wandering and not knowing,” says Alisha Lee, a freshman from San Francisco. “We have a more definite sense of where we are going and what we want to do. We have a more direct sense of purpose.”

On the Sunday before the 10-week 1994 fall quarter begins, a huge welcome banner sprawls down the side of Dykstra and a brown drawbridge-like ramp has been placed over the steps. In the stone courtyard, tables are loaded with cookies, punch and check-in packets. Rental microwaves and refrigerators are stacked by a folding table.

About 35,000 graduate and undergraduate students have flocked to UCLA’s 419-acre campus, with undergrads paying almost $12,000 a year for classes, housing and food. Because of a slight miscalculation by college officials, this year’s freshman class has soared to 4,125, the largest in seven years. Ten-story Dykstra is so packed that the study lounge on most floors has been temporarily converted into a four-person bedroom. Ensconced on the bottom bunk of one of those lounges this week is a Times reporter.

*

Parents pull up in the driveway, disgorging the contents of packed cars onto dollies. Or they load their arms with printers and hair dryers, electric coffeepots and weights. “My daughter has moved half the things from our house here,” says Daniel Chan, a forensic toxicologist, referring proudly to sophomore Lisa, who is prying boxes from a van.

On the sixth floor, Jennifer Wall from the San Fernando Valley, along with her parents, grandmother and younger sister, eye the recently converted lounge that will be Jennifer’s new home. She selects her bed, an upper bunk with a desk underneath.

Jennifer reads the banner just outside her door, announcing the floor’s theme--Health & Well Being--and rolls her eyes at the prospect of an alcohol-free floor. “Don’t worry,” calls out a passing upperclassman. “A lot of kids here are going to be from overprotected families. Last year, this is where all the kegs were.”

Martha Wall, Jennifer’s mother, a high school math and science teacher, looks at the upper berth. “This will be the last time I ever make your bed,” she says. Although the family lives only 15 minutes away, Martha Wall has tears in her eyes as she kisses her 18-year-old daughter and tells her to do her errands while her parents unpack.

By Sunday evening, the flow of loaded dollies has diminished. Most students vigorously attack their rooms, moving beds, pinning up posters, setting out photographs--transforming barren rooms into shrines of personal style. They crank up the CD players and hook up their phone machines.

Until classes begin four days later, the week passes in a whirlwind of socializing, hanging out in the halls, sitting around the rooms, exploring the campus.

“You’ve got to check out the gym,” one girl tells another, “the guys, are like, sooooo cute.”

The mission is simple: meet as many classmates as possible. For many, it’s a venture punctuated by gaffes.

Five minutes into his first conversation with Alisha Lee, a young man on her hall points out two girls who don’t drink. Nerds, he pronounces. “How boring.”

Lee says she doesn’t drink either. “I’m a total straight-as-an-arrow person,” she says. He flushes and nods: “That’s cool.”

*

Three days before Libby Frantz arrived at UCLA, her mother left her father, taking half the family furniture. While she packed up her own stuff, Frantz mediated between her arguing parents, divvying up the lamps.

Frantz lives in a nearby dorm, but she hangs out at Dykstra because most of her friends are here. And this is a time when she needs good friends. “I’m totally excited about coming to college but how can I be excited when my family is falling apart?” says the Sacramento freshman.

Dykstra, nestled in the hillside just above Bruin Walk and the tennis courts, enjoys a reputation as a “totally raging hall,” so close to Frat Row that some students shut their windows on weekend nights in vain hope of muffling the pounding music.

Constructed for male students, Dykstra became one of the nation’s first co-ed dorms in 1960--which explains the urinals in the women’s lavatories. Originally, facing a room shortage, university officials decided to house women in Dysktra’s top three floors, with students allowed to mingle only on Sunday afternoons. Today, women and men have rooms side by side, and the degree of casual contact between the sexes is stunning.

One afternoon, Devin Senelick, fully dressed, spoons on a bed with one woman. Later that night at a party, he wraps himself around another. Romantic interests? No way. He advises against “dormcest”--involvements with women on his hall.

“Everybody flirts constantly; you can flirt 24 hours a day,” says Senelick, a former high school valedictorian.

Rumors tear through the dorm. Jennifer Wall, who wants to be a pediatrician, has heard about people who sneak into labs and destroy their classmates’ science experiments. Laura Hiser, a freshman from San Diego, has heard that cafeteria workers spray food starch on salads because officials don’t want people to eat only lettuce and become anorexic.

Her roommate, Shian White, also a freshman from San Diego, spells out another threat: The dreaded Freshman 15, or the amount of weight allegedly gained during the stressful first year when students are set loose in cafeterias that offer bins of sugar-packed food.

Even before anyone cracks a book, the pressure is intense.

“I feel like I have one big chance,” sighs Wall, who worked for a stockbroker for $6.75 an hour and at a tanning salon for $5.75 an hour before arriving here. “My parents say if I party too much and get bad grades, I can stay home and go to the community college.”

*

George Park’s father, who runs a dry-cleaning business and attended college in Korea, calls him almost every day to make sure he has everything he needs. He repeatedly asks about buying his 18-year-old son a computer--an offer that the younger man declines because the university has some available for student use.

“It’s very important to my parents that I do well,” says the freshman from Lake Forest, speaking above the din of his roommate’s music. “They want me to get a professional job which has a lot more security than their business. They had to work real hard when they came to this country; they figure they will do the menial jobs and give the kids a better chance.”

Park says he’s grown accustomed to his parents pushing him. In fact, he has a game plan for the quarter. In the beginning he’ll hit the books hard, hoping to taste more campus life once he susses out the difficulty of classes.

Despite these pressures, the excitement level soars.

“I have wanted to go here since third grade because Mary Lou Retton did,” says Jessica Schoenfeldt of Chicago, one of 150 out-of-state students admitted to the freshman class. (She’s close; Retton attended the University of Texas, but her 1984 Olympic stardom was earned on the mats of UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion.)

“I walk around here with a big smile on my face,” says freshman Russell Artman.

On Thursday, the first day of class, Artman gallops down five flights of stairs and tears across campus for introductory philosophy. Partway through the lecture, the New Yorker, who drives a Lexus and has a fax machine in his dorm room, confronts his first dilemma: to raise or not to raise his hand.

“Should I ask in front of all these people?” he wonders to himself, surveying his 300 classmates. Feeling apprehensive yet daring, he clears his throat, thrusts his arm and asks: “What is the difference between rational belief and certain belief?”

A sense of triumph sweeps over him.

“I was proud that I had the guts,” he says later.

*

That same morning, Myisha Battey walks 25 minutes to introductory sociology class. She settles into her seat early as the auditorium fills. A dozen students stand in the aisles.

Prof. Chuck O’Connell tells the packed crowd that 10 years of budget cuts have caused this class to more than triple in size. “If you don’t like the herd atmosphere in college, get on the horn and call the governor,” he suggests.

When Battey returns to Dykstra that afternoon, roommate Lisa Yassinger, a freshman from Sacramento, is preparing for one of the crucial final rounds of sorority rush.

Some strange twist of fate has flung together in one room the two girls who seem to be such opposites. Yassinger, the daughter of a doctor and a homemaker from Sacramento, sleeps late; Battey, the daughter of a school district administrative assistant and a janitor from South-Central Los Angeles, wakes early. On Yassinger’s unmade bed, a cascade of clothes, papers and books descends in a mound upon the three stuffed bears and the furry alligator. Across the small room, Battey’s bed, sheets and blankets tightly tucked in, looks bare by comparison.

Yassinger isn’t sure about her career goals but thinks she might work at “the corporate level” of a business. Battey wants to be a doctor but because of financial constraints, she figures she’ll work first as a nurse and save money for medical school.

Yassinger, a sociology major, has a closet packed with pricey clothes. At her high school, the parking lot was filled with Jeeps and BMWs. Yassinger arrived at college with friends in tow. Rarely alone, she goes to meals as part of a triumvirate.

She worries about her mother, who is divorced, because she’s living alone, having dispatched her youngest of five children to college.

During her high school senior year, Battey worked full-time as a cashier at a soul food restaurant. At UCLA, while Yassinger is doing sorority rush, Battey lands part-time jobs at Ackerman Union’s juice bar and candy shop. She doesn’t have a lot of friends on campus, but her boyfriend visits.

“Lisa’s father could tell you about the inside of an intestine, but he doesn’t know how to fix a phone--my boyfriend did,” Battey says proudly.

*

Yassinger grows consumed by rush, a seemingly never-ending flurry of get-togethers where she and the other candidates chat over glasses of orange-flavored water. (Exotic drinks and elaborate spreads of catered food were banned after they became part of what university officials thought was excessive competition to lure sorority sisters.)

To kick off rush, sorority representatives gather on the auditorium stage at Ackerman. They sing “Summer Rushing Can Be a Blast” to the tune of “Summer Love” from the musical “Grease,” belting out the chorus: Tell me more, tell me more, like what should I wear? Tell me more, tell me more, like what to do with my hair?

To win acceptance, the women are evaluated by members of each of 11 sororities. The chatter is stressful, reports Yassinger’s friend from childhood, Sheryl Marks, a freshman from Benicia in Northern California. How do you prepare, she asks rhetorically, for witty repartee about where you’re from, or about questions that leap out of nowhere, like teen sex or the fact that your bra strap is showing?

By the end of the second day Marks is sure she has screwed up. Ruefully she recounts asking a sorority sister named Barbie: “Did your parents name you that or is that your nickname?”

“I felt so dumb,” she says.

After three days, Marks and Yassinger narrow their choices to the same two sororities. That Thursday evening, they and dozens of others will meet at the fountain to learn whether the sororities want them . For the event, Yassinger lends black cocktail dresses to Marks and Libby Frantz. Her mother has rush-delivered a brand-new black spaghetti-strap gown for her. (“Mom saved the day,” she says proudly.)

“Preference Night,” as it’s called, is a big evening. Battey gets off the phone with her boyfriend so Yassinger can call her brother. Yassinger agonizes over her accessories: A simple gold chain or a double strand of imitation pearls? Silver or gold bracelet? High black heels or low pumps?

Battey advises her not to mix gold with silver and to wear the pumps.

“Will you zip up my dress?” asks Yassinger, tossing her curly brown shoulder-length hair.

“What an honor,” says Battey wryly, and then asks about her date. Only women are allowed. Battey rolls her eyes.

Yassinger and her friends join several dozen gown-clad women waiting at the fountain like skittish racehorses before the starting gate. One by one, the women are handed folded pieces of paper informing them of their top one or two sorority possibilities.

Marks and Frantz squeal with joy. They got both of the ones they wanted. On the other side of the fountain, Yassinger sits on a bench and unfolds her paper. Crestfallen, she slouches and blinks rapidly. She is the only one of her friends who didn’t get her first choice.

“It’s no big deal, really ,” she says.