What began as a quirky idea to have our trainees profile random people in the spring has quickly transformed into an Eye tradition: We now structure our trainee program around a themed project every semester. This time, we asked our trainees to write about local businesses around campus. In pairs, they set out and visited the stores they frequent most, talking to employees, salespeople, and business owners to deep-dive into the stories behind the storefronts. In doing so, they found intrigue between shelves at a bookstore and a hardware store, tucked into the booths of a local gay bar, and on the top shelf next to dusty typewriters at a stationery store.

In the corner of Room 420 at the Spectator office, there is a wall lined with old covers of The Eye from the early 2010s, when The Eye was printing regularly. Catchy headlines from “Corps Curriculum” to “Majoring in Kink” hang above well-worn beanbags, inviting us to imagine the stories from so many years ago contained within their yellowed newsprint—stories now memorialized on our wall, the backdrop to passionate staff meetings and deliriously late nights of production.

Human stories are the very core of what we do here at The Eye. They drive us. Our goal as a family of writers and eclectic humans is to wade past the pleasantries of “What’s your major?” and “Where are you from?” in search of the hidden idiosyncrasies that are the stuff of late-night, meaning-of-life conversations between close friends.

Sometimes, while I’m walking around campus, a certain memory catches me off guard. More often than not, it occurs when I pass the balcony next to Kent, the one by Low looking out at the lawns. I cannot say for sure what triggers it, but I think it involves a certain combination of stimuli—the conversation of students lounging on the steps, the particular angle of sunshine striking Butler’s facade. I cannot help myself: I find myself back on that bright day I first toured Columbia’s campus in an October now three years old.

Literary Texts, Critical Methods, the introductory lecture of the undergraduate English major, is the program’s only required course. According to the department’s website, the course seeks to present a “variety of critical schools and approaches, with the aim both of familiarizing [students] with these methodologies in the work of other critics and of encouraging them to make use of different methods in their own critical writing.”