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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.

“The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice.” Anisa Tavangar, a 2018 Barnard graduate, recites Baha’i writing when I ask what beauty means to her. To Tavangar, beauty is a reflection of justice—it is a quality that extends beyond the standards of pretty and it is imbued with larger and deeper truths. During her tenure as its editor-in-chief, Hoot Magazine has become more than a fashion/beauty college magazine—it’s been a platform for the diverse identities on campus to creatively express and embrace themselves.

Television staples like The Office and Parks and Recreation held little interest for Seyi Olojo growing up; instead, she spent her time watching documentaries. China’s Lost Girls, a National Geographic release exploring the gendered consequences of China’s one child policy resonated with her, and Olojo began to see the intersection of the environment and governmental policy—interests which would later blossom into her academic work.

You could find her riding a city bike with no particular destination or writing poetry at Butler Library instead of doing her homework, but if you’re looking for Aidan Sullivan anywhere between 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. on the weekend, you’re likeliest to find her behind the bar at 1020.

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

When I meet Angela Beam, I find her chatting with a student from Millie 10, the NSOP group she led as an orientation leader two years ago. Halfway into our conversation on a porch in front of Milbank Hall, Dean Avis Hinkson emerges out of building and shouts “Angela!”, and the two wish each other a good summer. At the end of our interview, as we leave Barnard’s campus, she exchanges waves and mouthed hellos with Dean Rebecca Grabiner. When Beam started at Barnard, all she hoped for was to be an active member of campus. After four years, it’s clear she’s far surpassed mere campus involvement.

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.

Rowan Hepps Keeney pulls back the sleeve of their Barnard admissions office T-shirt to reveal a roughly four-inch tattoo of the tesseract—a cube within a cube; a two-dimensional manifestation of a four-dimensional analogue—from the novel A Wrinkle in Time on their bicep. Hepps Keeney loved the story growing up, but that was only a minor consideration when they decided to get inked; they mainly wanted an epidermal reminder of the time they played Calvin in CU Players’ 2016 adaptation of the novel, a role, they say, that changed the course of their Barnard career. Playing Calvin was how they met their current girlfriend, but it was also the moment they realized there exist places in mainstream theater for nonbinary actors.

It was time for dinner after a long Monday but the doors to the Diana Center dining room were locked. Through the glass walls, students were speaking passionately but wordlessly, or so it seemed to those of us outside.