Non-smokers

While passing Butler, I always see smokers outside. Or, at least, I can’t remember the last time “always” wasn’t the case.

I’m standing in the Barnard quad, wrapped up against the first cold day of fall. I look over the shoulders of four prospective students, four nervous parents, and one very excited high school counselor at Aydan Shahd, who’s about to give an admissions tour. Shahd starts the tour off with a quick introduction: “Hi, my name is Aydan. I use they/them pronouns. I’m a junior at Barnard. I’m from Singapore, and I’m majoring in English with a theater concentration.”

Just the other day, I was in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions, waiting to be interviewed for a tour guide position. I arrived a little bit early, so I passed the time in the lobby by thumbing through the Columbia brochures on the table next to me. Reading those fliers brought me back to my senior year of high school. I remember getting dozens of such pamphlets in the mail, all trying to sell me on their particular college. I always thought it was funny that in order to market themselves as the “best fit” for any student, these brochures all ended up sounding the same. They all proudly boast of their “world-class faculty” and “dozens of majors to choose from” so much that, eventually, nothing sounds unique to each school besides its location and name. Unfortunately, the same could be said about the School of General Studies brochure when compared to the other undergraduate colleges at Columbia.

One week after classes began for the fall term, 47 percent of Barnard courses were not in compliance with a federal law mandating that professors list textbook information and retail prices online before students register for classes, a Spectator investigation found.

A lot of us come to Columbia as first-years thinking that we’ll change the world. We want to save the refugees; we want to eradicate malaria; we want to end world hunger. A few of us persevere and go to work for organizations like UNICEF, Oxfam, or Médecins Sans Frontières—or Doctors Without Borders—but most either give up on our humanitarian dreams or fail. Some of us are true academics, and go off to write Ph.D.s, but a lot of us “sell out” and work in lucrative industries like banking, consulting, and software engineering.

It’s become something of a tradition to cut your hair short when attending a women’s college. Not everyone does it, of course, but it’s a common enough occurrence to have earned its place as a familiar trope, a well-known part of Barnard culture. When I first got here, I didn’t feel such an urge—but now I sit, a month and a bit into my sophomore year, ready to chop it off. But I’m not here to mark my entrance into a new kind of womanhood, as is often the case when it comes to the “Barnard Chop.” Rather, I’m marking an exit from it.

Returning to Columbia two weeks ago for this, my last semester, stirred all sorts of funny mixtures of emotions. I felt at home, greeted by the stately columns of Low, the familiar façade of Butler. But I also felt as if a burden had settled onto my shoulders. It was a familiar weight—the weight not just of having plenty of work to do, but of having plenty of work to do playing up how much work I have to do. We all know that it's not "cool" at Columbia to get eight hours of sleep (or at least to admit it). Though the Facebook photos of you ice skating in Central Park or gazing at the Met's treasures will receive plenty of likes, they will also trigger a lot of jealous "How on earth does he/she have the time to do that?" ruminations.