Congratulations on getting this far into the Fed! The staff has worked incredibly hard on it, and if you are a Freshperson, you are to be further congratulated: this one's for you!

This summer, it was the staff's task to think of advice they could impart to you. (When creative juices were spent, they were to work steadily on their superpowers.) All of us here have done the Freshperson gig and moved on, and that makes us better. And wiser.

But even as the most intelligent members of the Columbia community, many of us had trouble knowing what to say to you. Some advice was too precious to part with (for free), and the rest could not be joked about in an obscene manner (rendering it useless to us).

I myself find it difficult to decide what to say and how to summarize in an instructive manner. Some things are easy. E.g. the University's bureaucracy, notorious for making life senselessly more difficult and working every day towards careful control of student life, has well earned its reputation. You will have a problem, and it will take a week of protesting to correct it. Or maybe you need a special doctor's note for a student visa to a foreign country, but they do not do that, and they are not going to do that, and you can wait in Health Services as long as you want, but quite frankly it is easier just to find a friend with a doctor parent who will vouch for your mental health and freedom from yellow, scarlet and chartreuse fever.

It is easy enough to say, too, that if you want orgies (on campus), you have to transfer to Yale. Or if you want advising, call your mother. If you want the Core, good; it is the only thing that will come to you. Shower often, and you will have invariably one friend. And should this fail, come down to the Fed office. We will always sit next to you.

Well, I hope this issue lends itself as a helpful guide light, perhaps even that it becomes the coxswain of your journey. If not, then I pray it prove useful as the placemat of your take-out, and that you continue to pick up the Fed once every three weeks when you spot it around campus.

This year proves to be an exciting one for you and for us. I cannot shake from my ears the words of a highly paranoid and misdirected individual who's ramblings landed in our inbox: "I used to be one who said: There are no coincidences. Now, I am one who says: There are no accidents." (Leland Mellott)

Mos def. I have taken on the Fed from last year's 2 Hot to Handle Editor In Chief, Laurie Marhoefer, and this is no accident; it cost me $25! Nor is it coincidence that one of the finest ladies in town built up this Other Paper from the ashes of its former self two years ago, and attracted some of the coolest kids on the block to come work for it. It cost her $35 a head! Regardless, I could not be luckier to have inherited such capable and can-do people for the staff from which you, the reader, stand most to benefit.

Thanks for your readership, to our loyal cohorts and to you, especially.