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...

Sources referred to only by their first names in this story have been given pseudonyms due to fear of retaliation.

There is no empty space in Oasis Jimma Juice Bar. What part of the shop isn’t occupied by people and food is still full to bursting with smell and sound. The sharp, clean scents of fresh fruit and turmeric jostle for your attention, butting up against the high whir of blenders and the clatter of the 1 train outside. Health-related aphorisms jump out from the posters on the lime-green wall to greet the continuous flow of both students and locals who drift in and out––in this house, you respect “Nature’s amazing pharmacy!” ..

It is late one Sunday evening and I am on my way to the third floor of Uris Hall. The elevator opens onto a large commonspace with computer stations on the right, a glass conference room at the back, and golden oak colored lockers framing the wide hallways. The space feels like something from the suburbs, too large to exist on a crowded city campus. Tomorrow, this sleeping giant will house 350 faculty members and 1,500 business school students; today, the radical possibility of such an enormous amount of space feels overwhelming. ..

Content Warning: This piece deals with issues of death and grief.

Between May 2016 and October 2017, at least two postdoctoral researchers and one associate research scientist at Columbia died by suicide.

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