You can't take it with you?

Those goddamn bleachers have gone up again, heralding the annual pomp and circumstance that ushers another brood of Core Curriculum-infused Columbians out into (formerly) high-paying finance jobs, in hopes that some of the proceeds will make their way back into Alma Mater’s voluminous folds.

Every year, I’ve felt an involuntary sense of revulsion seeing those soulless metal erector sets being built, not only because they make the Steps look like the cheap seats at Yankees stadium, but also because I knew that one day they would be meant for me and my fellow broodlings. The bleachers, the fresh heaps of mulch and reseeded flower beds, the black picket corrals—they all seem to power-wash and prune the collective experiences of each graduating class. As we try to organize and archive our college memories, they ceremonially and impassively erase our memories from the institutional record. As my defense mechanisms of denial buckle beneath the weighty imminence of graduation, I can’t help but wonder what insights I can unearth from the last four years here before they’re buried in manure.

I started college, like most people, on uncertain footing, looking for somewhere to belong. One month in, I found myself at the Spectator office, eager to try something new and to be part of something big and meaningful. After flirting with reporting for about three weeks, I threw myself instead into the production cave and spent the next four semesters finding new ways to illustrate Columbia athletic losses, victories, and the occasional club hockey scandal.

The two years I spent sitting in a whitewashed room ‘til 3 a.m., arranging headlines and yelling at the sports associates to finish their captions, were exhausting, frustrating, and utterly narcotic. The thrill of seeing a printout pass cleanly through Copy (only to discover the next day that you forgot to remove your offensive dummy headline) was more intoxicating than snorting a line off of the K4 server. Even though the air was perpetually permeated with kvetching, overworked iMacs, and V&T pizza grease, it also buzzed with purposeful, electrifying activity.

Eventually, however, the buzz wore off, and the disillusionment that comes from not even reading the paper you work for slowly set in. I was part of something big, but the meaning got lost among the text boxes and teasers. And so I left the reservation.

To the graduating senior, or at least to this one, the indeterminate structure of the future leads the mind to force patterns on the past and to create a logical progression of events to the present. So, it seemed to me that after leaving Spectator, my life seemingly switched from newsprint to Technicolor. In that revisionist narrative, a single seminal event—my “mid-college crisis” as it were—changed everything.

But, for me, that dialectical boiling-down of conflict and resolution just doesn’t fit the full breadth and wealth of memory that have seeped into every corner of campus. How could it? Yet still that temptation exists to simplify things, to close this chapter in our lives with a certainty of what was achieved and what changed between the start and finish lines.

That’s not how it really went down though. Each of us has changed constantly, persistently. It was a gradual evolution rather than punctuated equilibrium. Think back on your own years here and you’ll realize just how far we’ve come. Almost everything that has happened has left its mark or impression. It is that hodgepodge of remembrances, of friendships and fire drills, sleepless nights and naps in class, relationships and breakups, plays and papers, and casual conversations and constant campus controversies that form the corpus of our life at Columbia. It may not be perfect, but it was real and tangible, and despite all efforts to the contrary, it can’t be simply summarized by clubs, crappy housing lottery numbers, or cups of Blue Java coffee consumed.

This may seem obvious to a lot of people, who, if they’re still reading, are probably wondering why I am even bothering to write this. I’m not sure I myself know the reason, except to acknowledge that I have realized too late that I’m about to leave Columbia and can say with all certainty that I’m not ready to go. Even if I didn’t leave a permanent impact on the campus while I was here (other than a few messages scrawled in the tunnels), the campus and all the wonderful people who populate it—from the friendships formed in John Jay to the bonds of suffering forged while waiting for BooBear, the sluggish Spectator printer­—have certainly left their mark on me. In a few weeks, after caps are tossed and I offer a final rude gesture to the bureaucrats at University Event Management (re: bleachers), I’ll be gone. But I know I’ll be taking Columbia with me.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in East Asian languages and cultures. He is a former associate and deputy production editor and staff photographer for the 131st Managing Board.