From the Mouths of Babes

My boyfriend’s parents were taking the campus tour of Columbia when the young guide pointed to Lewisohn Hall and said it housed the “controversial” General Studies program. When I came here, I had no idea I would be controversial. I thought I was finally taking the “traditional” path after a lifetime of non-traditional choices. I was unprepared for the animosity of Columbia College kids who loathe General Studies students in their classes. I was unprepared for the 100,000 dollars worth of debt I will carry for the next 30 years. Most of all, my first miserable semester left me unprepared for the many friends I would make across schools. After eight years and three colleges, it also left me completely unprepared for actually feeling sadness upon having to leave, rather than unadulterated joy (although there is plenty of that too).

I came to Columbia expecting a diverse, enlightened community ready for a robust exchange of ideas and instead spent the first semester feeling like a black sheep, banding together with the minority of undergraduates on campus who are my own age (at the time 25) and who had the same life experiences I did. We spent our time whining about the spoiled rich kids who had never worked a day in their lives and drinking beer legally. I spent a lot of that fall wondering why I was here.

The bunker mentality affects both sides of the GS/CC divide. CC kids hate it when GS students ramble about “life experience,” marginalizing the legitimate experiences of CC students. And GS students hate it when CC students making sweeping generalizations about things they have never experienced (welfare, homelessness, health insurance) and then discount the opinions of GS students who have lived them. Basically, it is a know-it-all face off.

I came to work at Spec after that first semester, having wrapped myself in a cocoon of other students of legal drinking age and firmly ensconced in the idea that most CC kids were uppity rich kids. Megan Greenwell was my training editor for the spring semester group (Spec gets a lot of flak, but we actually do train our writers), and I had never written a news story in my life. I was petrified, and as we went around the circle in a cheesy team builder, we were told to state our name, school, and AIM name from high school. Not only was I the only GSer, but I was also forced to sheepishly acknowledge that there was no such thing as IM when I was I was in high school. I stuck it out and things got better.

As a writer, I took guidance from kids who were much younger and listened to the advice of those who were barely legal to buy cigarettes. I had to drop the idea that they were “kids” and learn from their vastly superior skills. Greenwell, my training editor, went on to report from Baghdad as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, and I think I would have been hard-pressed to find as good a teacher in any classroom as Leora Falk, who held my hand as I learned the ins and outs of the complicated relationships with neighborhood leaders in the city section. I made friends and worked my way up Spectator’s news ladder, spending late nights in the office and hanging out in my friend’s dorm arguing about objectivity, literature, and philosophy.

Spec made me push my own boundaries of what defines wisdom. This is the point in this exercise of reminiscing where we come to the trite moral. I learned more outside the classroom than in it during my time at Spectator. That also sums up how I spent my time at Columbia, but despite all of the skipped classes and panicked cramming, it was worth it. Out of the good friends I have made here, almost none of them are my age or share my background. Maybe the battle of the know-it-alls will only end when we show up for a group or a class admitting we know nothing and are willing to listen to whoever is willing to teach. In my case, my favorite lessons and my best friends came from the “kids” who I thought knew the least. Through Spec, I got to revisit the wonder of the wisdom of youth. Take every risk, push every boundary, and don’t let fear of the unknown rule your choices. More important than how to write a good lead or how to end an opinion piece, being reminded of the possibility of a life lived by those rules is the most precious thing I will take away from my time here.

The author is a student in the School of General Studies studying political science. She was a deputy Campus News editor and training editor on the 131st Deputy Board, and a member of the 132nd Editorial Board.