Four years ago, my grandmom said to me, “Life is good to you because you give so much to life.” At the time, I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it became clearer when I got to Columbia: everybody here is really good at something.

Sophomore year I lived with a ballerina/physicist who loves techno music and Dorothy Parker quotations. Biochemistry study sessions with my two other premed suitemates veer into debates on politics, education, and global health. One of my friends knows more about literature (and fashion magazines) than I ever could; another balances his lab work with possibly unhealthy amounts of Top Chef.

In high school I wanted to have a crowd, to be part of a big group of friends. But I tend to draw my close friends from different circles—and here, that’s not such a bad thing, nor is it uncommon. The social scene is more complex, and we are linked not just by living together or taking the same classes, but also by caring about the same social issues, having mutual friends, and getting involved in the same clubs.

For me, one of those opportunities was this newspaper. Spectator wound up being more than just an outlet for my bizarre fascination with grammar. Sure, copy editing itself could be entertaining—especially while deciding how best to hyphenate vulgar phrases—but it was in the space around the words that I met some of my favorite people at Columbia, and I doubt Spectator would have held my attention very long without them.

They brought carrots to the office, ate chocolate pudding even when they couldn’t find spoons, debated winter temperatures, and suggested obscure bands for me to listen to. They did neurosurgery on mice, wrote 80-page theses, and actually finished reading Gravity’s Rainbow.

I was grateful for someone to stick around and walk back to my dorm with me at 4 a.m. and for dinner-and-coffee breaks with a certain extreme skier. (Venti iced skim no sugar vanilla soy latte? Did I finally get it right?) When I found myself still at Spec at 6:30 a.m. on the day of a physics exam, it was the head copy editor who told me to go home and stayed until the paper was finished at 8 a.m.

Last week an ex-member of Spectator’s managing board told me that the best time to start writing a paper is 3 a.m. on the day it’s due. I never learned how to put together an essay in one night. Then again, I also never spent 50 hours per week in the Spec office.

I did learn at Spec that newspapers put only one space between sentences, that “United States” is used as a noun and “U.S.” as an adjective, that “website” should be “Web site,” and that even something as concrete as the year of someone’s death can be ambiguous on Google. My classes taught me how to write a research paper and how to diagram the mechanisms of the urea cycle.

But all that is a front, really, for the main point of college: how to be a complete person, not just a student. College is a space for negotiating between what you have to do and what you want to do, and for turning the first into the second. My friends showed me how to do my work without becoming a hermit, and how to make connections between my interests and what I’m studying in class.

They also taught me how to be a better friend and a better person. How to say what I mean, listen to people when they talk, and apologize when I screw up. How not to be a pushover, but also to assume that people don’t intend to be mean—and how to say something if they flip out again.

I still had braces when my first year began. I thought I would magically feel different once they came off, but it took a long time to learn to smile normally in photos. (I try to think of the grandmother of one of my friends from home, who tells photo subjects, “Say ‘safe sex!’”) Over the past four years I learned how to stop thinking so hard and just grin like an idiot. I subdued the self-consciousness.

The most important thing I learned in college? How to be happy.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in biology. She was an Associate Copy Editor on the 130th Associate Board and a Deputy Copy Editor on the 131st Deputy Board.