Coming to terms with Columbia

I like Columbia. This school has been good to me, and I’ve had a good run. That wasn’t always the case: for much of my time here, I was quietly disappointed and more than a little bitter. I couldn’t place why, but a 1929 Frederick Woodbridge quote (and Stand Columbia epigraph) gets pretty near the mark: “I have seen many a comer to Columbia a little lost because he has not yet found anything to worship.” I’m not lost anymore. I don’t know that I’ve found anything to worship here, but I’ve found enough to admire, and I’ve certainly found my place.

I came to campus with high hopes and absurd expectations. Orientation week tricked me into thinking that college was somehow about ineffable summer nights and unconstrained conversation and parties on the deck of the U.S.S. Intrepid, of all places. My romanticized image of university life was bound to run aground, and it did. The promised 4 a.m. philosophy conversations never quite materialized, at least not in the right way. I never made it onto the party circuit, partly because I didn’t know how and partly because I didn’t want to. I wasn’t miserable. I made good friends, I liked my classes, and I loved the independence of living on my own. But something was missing. The fact that I was attending a school as prestigious and as expensive as Columbia obligated me, in my naïve eyes, to tell anyone who asked that I was happy. I had trouble admitting to myself that I wasn’t.

In my first year, I spent most Thursday and Friday nights in self-imposed exile from John Jay 7, a local locus of hardcore partying. I wandered around campus listening to Mahler, Dvorak, and Shostakovich at deserted hours. At the time, I welcomed this weekly chance to introspect, but it was a symptom of loneliness and discontent, to say nothing of teenage angst. Nonetheless, it was a critical piece of my college years, and I can’t wish it away. If I worship anything at Columbia, it’s the spots all over campus where I burnt my midnight oil—Van Am Quad, Delacorte Fountain, Le Penseur, and places filled with Latin inscriptions I took the time to memorize. “Horam expecta. Veniet.” Await the hour. It will come.

Things were better sophomore year. I’d had a string of academic successes, and I was less of a wallflower. I was, however, still wedded to old notions about what Columbia ought to be. I blamed Columbia for losing touch with its past, its early history buried beneath Rockefeller Center, its modern history forgotten in the press of each new semester. I blamed Columbia for not having more midnight wanderers like me. I bandied about quick-fix theories of social interaction, as though some alchemical trick would turn my grievances into gold. If only I could find the right courtyard or the right club or the right conversational tactic, everything would miraculously fall into place.

By the end of junior year I had come into my own­—partly because I had matured, partly because I had found my niche, and partly because I had reconciled myself to what Columbia could realistically offer me. I stumbled on a relatively coherent academic plan (think economics), and I started putting my midnight oil to public use (think Spec). I carried myself like an upperclassman, someone who knew he’d earned his right to be at this place. I also discovered alcohol, bless it. Most of all, I found a critical mass of people wired sort of the way I’m wired. Those long-awaited philosophy conversations finally started happening, mishmashes of ethics and economics and biology and math. Everything since then has been good: just the academic grind and an easygoing way of life.

What I’ve come to appreciate—worship is too strong a word—about Columbia is that it gives its students the space in which to reinvent themselves, on their own time scales and on their own terms. I suppose that’s true of colleges everywhere, and I don’t mean to make it sound like some kind of profound revelation. I’m not presumptuous enough to claim that I’ve had anything other than a typical—which is to say typically idiosyncratic—tenure at Columbia. But if you want to take anything from this column, take this: A lot can happen in four years. If you’re graduating with me, you already know that. If you’re not, you’ve still got time to figure things out. Await the hour. It will come.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in economics-political science and concentrating in mathematics. He was a member of the Editorial Board for the 131st Associate Board and the deputy editorial board editor for the 132nd Deputy Board.