Senior Column: This time, no complaints

People always speak about college as a revelatory experience. College changed my life! Best four years! I blossomed! It’s a truth universally acknowledged that everyone is a critic, yet when it comes to college, it turns out that they’re all actually Peter Travers.

When I arrived at Columbia, I was not expecting any revelations. Freshman year I was unimpressed with my classmates. “The people here are dumb,” I complained to a friend from home.

I held on to this impression for longer than I’d like to admit. I was like that guy in the old joke:

A woman is watching TV one afternoon and she sees a news flash about a man driving down I-95 in the wrong lane. Her husband commutes home on 95, so she calls him in a panic: “Honey, there’s a lunatic on 95, driving in the wrong lane!” He snickers. “One? There’s like 600.”

Fortunately, unlike the guy in the joke, I didn’t have to collide with 600 tons of steel to detect the error in my thinking.

Instead, I had a gradual awakening. And I’d credit that awakening, in large part, to working at the Columbia Daily Spectator.

I showed up at Spectator on the first day of freshman year. I had written a humor column in high school and was hoping to continue at college. After a few minutes of investigation, I ascertained that there was no room for a humor columnist at the newspaper, but that I might be able to write for the humor page of The Eye, Spectator’s weekly magazine. Also, did I know grammar? If so, perhaps I should try copy editing.

“How do I apply to write?” I asked the humor editor. “We don’t have any, uh, writers,” he said. “Just come to a meeting next Sunday, and you can write whatever you want.”

That week, I passed the copy test and went to a humor section meeting (the guy wasn’t kidding about writing whatever I wanted—we once published an entire column in German). The rest is Internet-searchable history. I spent my first semester writing jokes and sitting at the copy desk complaining loudly about Columbians’ collective ignorance of the rules of grammar.

I was humor editor freshman spring and sophomore fall, then lead story editor at The Eye. That was beginning of my real career at Spec.

When I started as lead story editor, I had no idea what I was doing. I knew next to nothing about magazines and even less about reporting. But pretty quickly, I realized that didn’t matter. Because I was working with an exceptional group of editors and they knew what they were doing. In addition to being extremely bright and competent to a fault, they were very funny and also very patient, even when it was four in the morning and I was rereading the lead story for the fifth time looking for errant punctuation.

One night, we worked until the sun rose, then sat down at Tom’s for breakfast. We were so tired we nearly wept when someone told a joke. These were people to go to war with.

That night was exhausting and exhilarating—probably the best way to describe working at this newspaper.

After a year as lead story editor at The Eye, I was poised to move over to the daily as editorial page editor. Then, during my last final of junior fall, I felt a pain in my side. What I thought was a hernia turned out to be testicular cancer.

I’ve spilled seas of ink writing about being sick, and I need not spill much more. What’s worth noting, though, is that the hardest thing I had to do that spring was step down as editorial page editor.

Yet my life at Columbia has been semi-charmed (charmed because it’s been a blast, semi because I lost a nut). I missed a semester of school, but that was all. When I got back, thanks to my superb co-editor, Emily Tamkin, the opinion section was running like clockwork. By fall semester, most desk editors at Spectator are starting to burn out. That’s especially true of seniors, who are entering their seventh and eighth terms. I’d spent the summer resting, though, and I returned to Columbia and to Spectator full of energy. I was the opposite of disillusioned. Illusioned?

And so, this past fall, I spent many more nights in an office, happily surrounded by people who weren’t idiots after all.

Turns out I was the idiot.

But that’s all right. Because, as I learned in so many philosophy classes, the idiots are actually the smart ones. “He is the wisest,” spoke Socrates, who “knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.”

College was a revelation. Just a very slow one. It’s been real, Columbia. You’ve conferred upon me more kindnesses and more opportunities than I perhaps can understand.

I began my tenure at Spectator writing jokes, and that’s how I’d like to conclude it. For, in the words of Henry Ward Beecher, “Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one.”

In bed.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. He was a copy staffer on the 131st, 132nd, and 133rd boards, the humor editor for The Eye on the 132nd associate board, lead story editor for The Eye on the 133rd deputy board, and the editorial page editor on the 134th managing board.