The Fed

Things to Appreciate at Columbia

Here's what to look for

Jacquelinie Hidalgo

So you’re just arrived at Columbia, and if you’re anything like I was, your head is swimming and you feel like you’re at summer camp instead of college.  Not to worry, that feeling will go away before you know it when you’re hitting the books and complaining that college life is not what it was cracked up to be.  If you are anything like me, this is the moment you have built up to for your whole life.  Then for the first week, you’re just wandering around, living in this funky looking place, dealing with these totally bizarre people.  Then you’re taking classes, feeling defenseless before the great administration, and wondering if you even wanted to take a class like logic and rhetoric.  Then the people around you begin to seem equally disillusioned and equally uninformed about what is actually going on.  However, after a little bit, most people will adjust to this new lifestyle.  Before you start dreading it too much, I would like to offer some advice on things to enjoy and not take for granted while you are here.  I have had three years to gather an appreciation for the finer things, so don’t worry if you don’t notice them at first.

Dorm Life: Hopefully your first-year experience will not be littered with too many annoying people and fights over what programs to watch on the television.  College provides you the unique opportunity to hang out with your newfound friends at all hours of the night while you are up to all kinds of no good. (Be sure to take plenty of trips to places on this campus you are not supposed to be going).  While some of these nights may be spent trying to kill each other through Quake or communing with waterbugs, they are useful nonetheless.  Another unique thing about Columbia is the large amount of crazy people who go to school here.  It makes dorm life fresh and exciting.  The thing to appreciate about Columbia is that it is big and in the Big City.  While it is easy to lose someone, that means that it is also relatively easy to lose the people who annoy you.  Unless of course we’re talking about a stalker or some other sort of maladjusted person; then it may take you some more work to get rid of them. In which case, file to have them banned from the dorm. For those who stalk, good news: the campus is small enough that you can just "conveniently bump into people."

Rolm: This is quite possibly the greatest phone system created.  I know when you first moved in and could not check your messages, you had no idea how to make heads or tails of it.  However, when you go home for winter break and are waiting to hear whether it’s a single or double ring (denoting a coveted off-campus phone call), you will know what I mean.  Be sure to look through your rolm guide and understand all the neat things you can do with this phone from the basic camp (monitoring your friends’ phone lines so your voice can be the next voice they hear) to conference calling (for the elite rolm experts).

The Dining Hall: Most of you are looking at this and thinking that even after your first meal, this cannot possibly be positive.  Well, let me tell you a couple of things.  The food is not going to get better, but it is a common bonding point you will have with every single other first-year you meet on campus.  Not to mention that dinner in John Jay is a great way to meet people, run into people you haven’t seen in a long time, or simply to spend quality time with friends with all over the campus.  Not until graduation will you see so much of your class gathered in one room, and I assure you they will never be friendlier or more eager to laugh.

Your Professors: I warn you that some of them will not be able to teach (strong warning to the pre-med).  Some of them will care less about you than their precious research.  However, many of them will be the smartest people you will ever have chance to speak with and learn from.  Many of them will want you to come and talk to them in office hours.  This leads me to another topic.  Use the shopping period.  You have two weeks when you can pretty much add and drop classes at will.

Those two weeks are your opportunity to seek out Columbia’s best and brightest.  Don’t learn the hard way that you should never spend a semester with a boring professor.  There are far too many excellent classes at Columbia to feel like you’ve wasted a semester (except in the case of Logic and Rhetoric, but that will not be your fault.  That is a semester Columbia wastes for you.)  Columbia offers great classes, and if you do not feel in love with a couple classes a semester, you have squandered your time here.

Lerner Hall: You will never know what it was like to be a student here for three years without a student center.  You had better worship it and love it for the wonder it is or else I will personally come after you because it was built on my agony and suffering.  That building coast way more money than I will ever see in my life and it took them three years to build, and they are still not done.  None of us know what is in the Student Center, but you had better enjoy it nonetheless.
Love that you have a permanent address for four years.  Love that you have a main place on campus to go and see other undergraduates.  This is the only thing the administration will ever really do for you.  Learn to appreciate it.

No college is perfect.  If you stay in touch with your friends from high school that went to other schools and they are honest with you, you will find that people always complain.  Something is wrong everywhere, but that does not mean that college cannot be wonderful.  Sometimes the work is going to be stressful, sometimes life is going to be lonely, sometimes you are going to want to seek and destroy various members of the Columbia student body into a room and then drop a bomb on them, and some days, you may not love the Core.  However, other days, you will love the people you have met, you will feel inspired by one of your professors, you will have spoken with a dean who actually cared and wanted to help you.  Of course, but perhaps least important of all, you will love that you live in New York City.

August 30, 1999