Anna Raskind

Here's a headline we all see from time to time: "Waitress gets $1,000 tip from friendly stranger." Those stories have never felt like real news to me. They just always seemed so grand that they could never be feasible in real life, in our big, bad world.

This is not to say that because we all have our biases, being prejudiced is somehow okay. This is also not to say that if we are all biased, then all groups experience equal discrimination—they certainly do not. But it does mean that, if we do want to have effective national conversations on race and gender, we need to be more honest about our own thoughts and behaviors.

It is a myth that in order to have an eating disorder, you must be a skinny, white, middle-to-upper class girl who exhibits certain behaviors like pushing away her food when other people are watching or only eating soup and carrot sticks. But eating disorders are so diverse—both in their symptoms and in whom they affect—that oftentimes, you can't even tell when someone has a serious problem.

It's crazy that, well into my fourth year as a Columbia student, I still don't even feel like I live in Manhattan. I doubt that a student at NYU would say the same thing. Of course, their ability to feel like true New Yorkers is largely because of their downtown location, compared to our cozy uptown spot. We do actually have a good reason for not knowing New York as well as our NYU counterparts: Columbia's location is not as central, and it takes us a concerted amount of effort to get to the same places downtown as NYU students.

Columbia College offers more than 80 courses of study, in fields as diverse as dance, Earth science, and comparative literature. Some majors aren't even formally listed, and some, like medicine, literature, and society, might cater to just one student in a given graduation class. The diversity of choices can be bewildering, and the difficulty of coming to a final decision is sometimes heightened by parental pressure to choose a more practical major.

We have collective admissions trauma here at Columbia. We all know how hard it was to get in, so we hold on to our "Ivy League" identities tightly, even tighter if you tasted the sweet fruits of rejection from other schools in the process. Mostly it's a good thing to appreciate our "spots" here at Columbia, but it bothers me when Columbia kids look down on other students, especially "state school" ones, for not getting into an Ivy League, like admissions somehow proves intelligence, and only we could be in our Columbia "spots."

I had a weird summer with caffeine. When I first got back home, I started getting headaches every morning, not realizing until a few days later it was because of the change in caffeine intake. Toward the end of last semester, I was going to Oren's three times a day to stay awake during finals—which didn't seem bad, until I realized three medium coffees is 48 ounces, or six cups.

I feel an odd sense of stigma for being an upperclassman with a dining plan. "Older" students - describe their dining plans like they do Tinder: "I don't really use this," but they know they do. Whether or not you eat in the dining hall shouldn't be that interesting, yet I always feel like I must justify myself for eating in John Jay or Ferris—gasp!—voluntarily.