Senior Column: Reaching for the unattainable

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine suggested I write a book about my experiences at Spectator. She even had a title in mind: “Coding and Laughter: How I Learned to Code and Laughed Along the Way.” I’m pretty sure it was a joke, though when I brought it up a week later, she seemed just as adamant that I go through with it. As a compromise, I decided instead to give her a shout-out in my senior column and appropriate the rest of the words allotted to me as a prologue to this potential memoir. I’ve already held up to the first half of my promise; now, it’s time for the second.

When I started writing this column, I had no idea what I wanted to say. I still don’t. Ben Cotton, former editor in chief of the Spectator, once commented, “I’ve been writing my senior column in my head for years now.” Unfortunately, I have not. When asked by a friend whether I was enjoying writing it, I said, “It’s never going to be as good as you want or envision it to be, so you just do what you can, I suppose.” Her response was an interesting one: “That’s sort of what the Spectator is.” She was right—you spend days working at this newspaper, trying your hardest to reach this ideal that deep down inside, you know you can’t exactly reach. But you keep trying, because that’s what working for the Spectator is all about.

So here I go, trying to awe you with my delicate menagerie of metaphors for the college experience. If I’m successful, I’ll elicit a tear or two, but that’s unlikely. I’ve never been great with words—in fact, if you search “Nilkanth Patel” up there in the top-right, you won’t find a single article attributed to my name. At times, that makes it easy for me to marginalize my involvement with and contributions to the Spectator. I’ve never pulled an all-nighter in the office. I’ve never played the “I’ve-got-more-overdue-school-assignments-than-you-do” game with fellow editors post-PDF-ing. I’ve never had the opportunity to make a witty quip about Boo-bear’s lame existence. In fact, I’ve never even used Boo-bear. (N.B. Boo-bear is the name given to the office printer. It is very old, and fickle, and like most aged people, has very little control over its bowel movements.)

So then what do I have? I have pages and pages of unforgettable G-Chat conversations—ones that helped me find (and keep) some of my closest friends here. I have relationships responsible for both my happiest and my most painful moments at Columbia. I have people who helped me segue into college and will soon help me segue into the rest of my life. And, of course, I have bros that I can always count on to watch an episode of Arrested Development with me when I’m too tired or too lazy to do anything else.

I always found it cliché to say something like, “I arrived on campus a bleary-eyed freshman with a passion for journalism.” I won’t use that sentence (again) for two reasons—first, because I’m too cool to be cliché and second, because it’s not true. I didn’t know what I wanted from college. But that was when Spectator stepped in and showed me what I could have from it. It showed me what I could be, and then it helped me become better than that.

And this wasn’t just a result of the work it demanded of me. Or the commitment it commanded of me. Or the lessons it taught to me. Or the people it brought to me. It was a result of all of those things and their collective impact on my mental and social development at Columbia. If writing this column is a metaphor for working for the Spectator, then working for the Spectator must be a metaphor for life. You spend your years living your life, trying your hardest to reach this ideal that deep down inside, you know you can’t exactly reach. But you keep trying, because that’s what life is all about. And one day, you’ll finally get there.

The author is a senior in the School of Engineering and Applied Science majoring in biomedical engineering. He is a former online associate editor on the 132nd board, multimedia editor on the 133rd board, and an online editor on the 134th managing board.