It's the perfect storm for a college senior.

Classes are ending, the snow has finally subsided and yielded to green grass, and as graduation nears, a headfirst dive into the real world is imminent.

This is the time of the bar-hopper; the infamous week of the bar tour.

Over the course of finals week, hundreds will flock from bar to bar sporting brightly colored T-shirts bearing some witticism or inside joke.

Bartenders will dole out beers, shots and mixed drinks as students participate in day-long drink-a-thons.

But a bar tour doesn't just come together by itself. It takes someone with the ability to deal with logistics and directions while managing to keep a group of people -- sometimes an increasingly inebriated group -- in line.

"I sorta just took it upon myself," said Jason Stine (senior-mechanical engineering), head of the 'X double-dot' bar tour. "I've had this professor for four different classes, and he's a notoriously tough grader so we decided to make a bar tour about him."

The 'X double-dot' bar tour planned to hit a total of 10 different bars last Saturday starting with Mad Mex, 240 S. Pugh St.

Another bar tour, "Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder," also took place last Saturday but, instead of visiting just 10 bars, decided to go all-out across the downtown area of State College.

"We're going to 22 bars," Melanie Ranalli (senior-public relations), who planned the bar tour, said.

"We're starting at one in the afternoon, and we will end at two in the morning," Ranalli added.

Ranalli said the tour has been in planning for months because several of the members don't live on campus anymore.

"It took a couple months because a couple of the people are student teaching so we had to find a date that would accommodate everyone," she said.

Both Stine and Ranalli agreed that a big part of planning a bar tour is starting the preparations early enough.

"The T-shirts [are important]," Stine said.

"A lot of T-shirt places won't print the names of bars [on the shirts] because it's copyright infringement, so you have to be careful about that," Stine added.

Ranalli also mentioned that ordering the T-shirts in enough time was essential to planning a bar tour.

"We ordered ours online so it took a couple weeks to get them in," she said.

Another important aspect of bar tour planning is picking the route. Does one decide to follow a specific route around town, or go from bar to bar according to what specials are on at the time?

Both 'X double-dot' and 'Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder' decided to plan their tours by a set route around town.

"Make sure the bars are actually open [along the route]," Ranalli said. "[The bars on] the east side of town don't open until later in the afternoon."

With so many bars and restaurants within walking distance, many of the downtown establishments are more than willing to accommodate bar tours, just as long as the students on them behave responsibly.

"We certainly like to accommodate bar tours," Jennifer Zagrelli Hoag, director of operations for Dante's Inc., said. "It's sort of a rite of passage for college students."

However, Hoag said she asks one thing of students when on their bar tours: that they resist defacing surfaces with graffiti or start carving things into tables and chairs, she said.

"Graffiti has been a problem," Hoag said.

"Students write the names of their bar tours on the walls, and they have to be repainted. People carve things into my nice wooden tables, and then they have to be repaired, and it all costs money," she added.