Lights Out

Readers of senior columns should be kind enough to allow the writer two things: nostalgia and a license to fail. Every graduating senior spends these last few weeks reminiscing and thinks the whole world should care. And 800 words are not nearly enough to do justice to four years at college—if the years were used they way they should have been. No metaphors or images can evoke such complex changes in so short a space.

Still, I have to try. So:

I didn’t think I was going to leave New York after I graduated. When people asked me what I planned on doing when college was finished, my answer missed the point of the question: “I’m going to stay in the city, I hope,” I would say.

Reality set in, though. Come March, I needed a job, and took one teaching in Wilmington, Del. Whenever I tell people here where I’m going next year, they laugh. I might as well say I’m going to work in Anchorage, Alaska.

It’s funny how circumstance shapes our college years (and the rest of our lives, of course). Had Intro to International Politics not been so lame, I might be planning to start work at the United Nations next month. Had the College Democrats elected me as a first year representative, I probably would have thrown myself into progressive causes, already completed three Washington internships, and have a job lined up with a senator. Instead, the Dems chose somebody else; it’s a silly club, I thought, and I never went to one of their meetings again.

After fiddling for my first two years, I started writing for Spectator when I was a junior. Through some accident, I was made city news editor after writing for a semester. Since then, I have done little besides work on the paper, and it has shaped me as much as anything I’ve done in my life. A few memories stick out: the week of the race protests last year, where, from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed, I was either talking about them, writing about them, or editing stories about them; the summer night when we decided during a conference call it was time for Spec to go color and broadsheet; and picking the new slate of editors last December, a grueling two-day series of interviews and arguments that culminated with hardened, generally cynical student journalists sitting around crying. First-year Matt would have laughed at the ridiculousness of that image; “Why get so sentimental over a paper that people mostly mock?” he would have asked.

I won’t answer that question, though it probably would be worth exploring. The point is that, against all odds, most people find a place for themselves. My first year, when I was still afraid to stay in on Thursday nights because it wasn’t cool, I remember seeing people become seriously involved with clubs, or with sports, or with academics—and being jealous. I was a lost soul: slow to make friends, doing mediocre work in my classes, and wondering why I hadn’t gone to Cornell with my best friend from high school, who quickly befriended everybody in Ithaca.

It takes a couple years to realize that everybody is insecure freshman year, even if some can hide it better than others. The novelty of college creates the illusion that one’s experience is different from everybody else’s. As I write this, though, I realize that almost everyone I know could write a similar senior column: a story of fitting into some found niche. That’s college; that’s also New York. The combination of these two daunting environments at Columbia makes it especially satisfying when one finds one’s home.

In all the confusion, we sometimes forget what a luxury society offers us with college, especially at Columbia. In these four years, we get to take classes with some of the smartest people in the world; live with the most interesting of our peers; explore and sometimes immerse ourselves in whatever we choose; and enrich ourselves in the world’s most exciting city.

Too much luxury, however, is not a good thing. It causes dilettantism and laziness; actually, a little luxury can cause that, too. So I’m ready to move on, though that doesn’t mean I want to.

After this summer, I’ll go to Wilmington to start teaching. God only knows where that will lead, but God was also the only one who knew where Columbia would lead. So that’s all right. But I know leaving everyone will be sad, and so will leaving New York, the city I thought I’d stay in forever.

I forgot one thing senior columnists need: a license to write at length about themselves. But we have a good reason: by examining ourselves, we can learn truths that apply more generally. Montaigne wrote about that.

Capturing Columbia is hard, as I guessed it would be. So is leaving it.