Isabelle Robinson

Having grown up in predominantly Jewish communities, I was blissfully unaware of the realities of modern anti-Semitism for a very long time. To my eight-year-old self, anti-Semitism was black-and-white Holocaust movies, yellow stars, and the elderly survivors who spoke at my Hebrew school every once in a while. Everything changed when I got old enough to start reading the news.

This past Wednesday, I was told that my friend Heather had passed away. My friend Julia, who flew home from a gap year in Brazil to see her, called to tell me the news mere minutes after sharing her last moments with Heather. Heather’s mother had called me the Sunday before to let me know that I should come down in the next few weeks to say goodbye. I immediately scheduled a flight for that Thursday.

When I first began applying to colleges in my senior year of high school, I was determined to attend a school where I could fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming fluent in American Sign Language. About a month into the process, I had essentially given up on this aspiration completely. Universities with complete ASL programs—or even the ability to take ASL classes—were simply too hard to find.

It’s easy to believe that once we move to the city, our lives will begin anew—that come move-in day this city will automatically make us more interesting, independent, and self-assured. We will dive right into our new lives unafraid, unencumbered by our boring, small town past. But when you arrive at Columbia’s gates, you’re still you, and the life you were living before is still yours. And you might just miss it.

My friend Elizabeth and I were on the subway to the New Student Orientation Program-promoted Yankees game when an upperclassman marveled at our fast friendship. She was impressed that, despite my being a Barnard student and Elizabeth being a Columbia student, we had shockingly discovered a common interest in politics, writing, and gun reform.

In a way, the mass shooting that occurred at my high school this February wasn’t so much personal as it was public. The whole country huddled around their TV screens to watch my classmates cower in closets, grieve their fallen loved ones, and march on Washington. But six months later, as the media attention, which had always bordered on the invasive, finally dies down, it often feels as if everyone outside of the city limits of Parkland, Florida, has elected to forget it.

Victoria Hou is a sophomore in Columbia College attempting to study political science and economics (like every other student at this school). Her claim to fame includes a few posts that reached over 1,000 likes on columbia buy sell memes and her being the reason why the class of 2021 got T-shirts at the New Student Orientation Program. To all sophomores: You’re welcome. H Mart keeps her sane, but trips down to Koreatown and Chinatown keep her happy. You can find her pretending to study in Ref, likely on Facebook and ranting about Asian American issues. You can also send questions, secret admirer notes, and hate mail at vh2279@columbia.edu. Chop Suey runs alternate Mondays.