Mostly, I remember the shouting. My house is four stories tall—including the basement—and sprawls out haphazardly across a hill. I’m standing in my bedroom, maybe the living room, maybe the kitchen. It doesn’t really matter. The shouts barrel through doors and hallways and up and down flights of stairs and find me wherever I am.

The cries travel from the gates of 116th and Broadway to the Morningside campus. It’s a Monday when graduate students strike in protest of the University’s decision to appeal the recent National Labor Relations Board ruling that allowed them the right to unionize.

Following the School of General Studies Class Day on May 14th, Spectator caught up with several newly minted graduates (and their families) to talk about their journeys to Columbia and their next steps.

At some point during our interview, Julien Reiman, a history major in Columbia College, stops abruptly—“What are you doing at 5 p.m.?”

Once upon a time, Pawel Maslag planned to go to Columbia and then go work for Goldman Sachs, “to follow the Columbia dream in some ways,” as he puts it.