Elza Bouhassira

When it’s you, a camera, and the subject of a portrait, it can be a surprisingly vulnerable situation for all parties. At Spec I was repeatedly put into new and, at first, uncomfortable situations—the student I am taking a photo of is nervous about being on camera, I’m nervous about getting the right shot, and we’re in it together for a little while. But only a few months into my time at Spec, I was working on a photo essay with a group of Spec photographers on the 2018 NYC Women’s March climbing on the walls lining Central Park to get a higher vantage point over the crowd, confidently moving around auditoriums during performances, and pitching ideas for my own photo essay.

We all know Columbia can be tough, but it’s important to not forget the small stuff. Last New Year’s Eve, one of my high school friends who had recently graduated told me that one of her biggest regrets from college was not having more fun while she was there. She said she’d spent too much of her time working or worrying. After our conversation, I made a pre-graduation bucket list of experiences I wanted to have before the end of the spring semester. The list was composed of new things I wanted to try and some things I felt like I wouldn’t be able to get away with once I’d graduated, even if I’d already done them.

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.