Elza Bouhassira

The GS Student Lounge is located in Lewisohn Hall; it’s a space open to all students in the School of General Studies. The lounge itself is a simple room, but the students who fill it bring the space to life. To capture how the GS Lounge impacts the lives of current students, I asked 12 of them what draws them to the space. Their responses tell the story of the lounge as a place where individual friendships are made and a greater community is formed.

More than 150,000 people took to the streets of New York to advocate for gun control this Saturday as a part of the March For Our Lives. Columbia students organized the New York march, which followed the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The perpetrator of the attack, Nikolas Cruz, is a former MSD student who legally obtained the assault rifle that he used to kill 17 students on Valentine’s Day. In the weeks since the tragedy, MSD students have been the leading voices in a movement to promote gun control and ban assault rifles in the United States.