By Bennett Hall, Contributor

A look into someone’s bag is like a look into someone’s private life, and many Manhattan College students seem to live similar lives, according to their belongings.

Although at Locke’s Loft it is very easy to tell the athletes from the rest of us, when you take a look at what their bags hold it may seem that not everyone is that different.

Many students had the typical essentials inside their personal bags: pens, pencils, note cards, wallets, and of course their laptops. Even if they were not carrying their designated school backpack, many people still had at least one of these items in their personal bag.

After asking to take a look in a few people’s bags throughout the course of the day, one item seemed to come up more than other miscellaneous items: lighters. It seemed as if half of the students bag’s had at least one lighter carried inside them, sometimes even two.

Although it seems as if not as many people are smoking cigarettes around campus since the new smoking rules, which designates certain smoking areas and bans others, a look inside their bags proves something different. Either people are still smoking cigarettes as much as before, or they’re finding other places to take their various smoking habits to after the infamous crackdown of Jasper Backyard’s smoking policies.

The only other item more prevalent than lighters were of course, pens. It seems almost necessary to have a pen at most times around a college campus. However, according to one student, their pens are not their most valuable bag item.

“My Tic Tacs are my most important item,” said Elizabeth Stenson, a sophomore. “They help me get through my long classes by giving me something to play around with.”

Her Tic Tacs, along with laptop, note cards, pens, and a hair clip, were not inside the typical backpack one would see the most. Instead, she carried around a small black leather bag that she bought from the online shop, ASOS.

“I usually shop there for most of my clothes, not just my bags,” she said. “I have a few others that I also rotate out just to keep things interesting.”

Tic Tacs are almost as coveted as gum around a campus, which many students also carried with them. After discovering that most students had relatively the same items in their bags, one item particularly stood out among the others.

In sophomore Grace Murphy’s bag there was contraption that looked like a more mechanical version of brass knuckles, except plastic and foam.

“My mom got me this before moving here,” she said. “You just hold on to it, and then when you pull down little claws come out in between the fingers just in case you need a little extra defense.”

Murphy said her mom bought her these to make sure she had something to protect herself, a common saying most of us have heard our parents say in one form or another.

The brass knuckle-like item was the most interesting thing found in bags that day, which could mean a couple things. Either students here have very similar lives, or they have private lives they do not want so easily seen from their personal bag.