Room-decor

While it may seem impossible to replicate the campus experience, many of us pull up pictures of our favorite spots and replay old videos when we’re feeling nostalgic. Alternatively, for a truly immersive experience, let your sense of smell come into play and introduce familiar scents to intensify your flashbacks. Here are 12 popular scents to conjure up a vivid image of your college lifestyle.

We have all been through it: The semester begins, work accumulates, and our rooms begin to look like rats’ nests, making it impossible to find that one textbook we needed for the next class. Your reason for having a messy room may be different from others, but here are some tips that will help keep your room clean either way.

It’s a week before finals and you are swamped with work: Essays need to be written; tests need preparing for; and labs need to be done. Speaking from personal experience, the hardest part of the week isn’t the excessive coffee-drinking or the all-nighters––it’s the helpless feeling of simply not knowing how to solve a problem or structure an essay. In those moments, the best solution is to reach out and get help. Detailed below is a series of Columbia’s undergraduate resources that one should make the most of.

New York City is home to the largest Chinese population outside of Asia, with over 100,000 Chinese residents in Manhattan. Although Morningside Heights has never been considered one of New York’s nine recognized Chinatowns, it houses over a dozen Chinese restaurants specializing mainly in Sichuanese and Hunan cuisines.

It’s that time of the year again—along with the chill of October, hints of yellow and red are starting to tint the greenery of Morningside Heights—and maybe your dorm room is starting to feel a little dingy. Maybe those $8 posters from the poster man on the corner of 116th and Broadway aren’t enough to lift the gloom of your suite. Do not fear! A simple solution will do the trick: a low-maintenance plant is the magical touch your living space needs.

Columbia Housing, Residential Life, and the Residence Hall Leadership Organization announced the transition of housing selection to a completely online platform on Thursday afternoon. This will occur alongside other changes to the process, including the restructuring of group selection and the extension of the timeline to help lessen the stress of room selection for students.

As midterms are approaching and your daily treks to Butler are starting to turn into all-nighters, you’re probably wondering why you hadn’t started studying or tried reaching out for help earlier in the semester. Before you break down under the overwhelming amount of stress you’re under, there might still be time to redeem yourself and your semester grades (and plan out your next semester more efficiently!) by using the tutoring services offered across colleges here at Columbia.

April marks the beginning of the end of the school year. As summer comes closer, so does the dread of the tedious move-out process. It’s hard enough to be a college student juggling the onslaught of classes, jobs, and clubs, and figuring out how to have a half-decent social life without the pressure of studying for your final exams—let alone packing up your entire life at college. Like all things, the key is to plan ahead so you’re not stressed out about moving during finals. Spectrum has come up with a step-by-step list on how to plan and prepare to make this process manageable and efficient.

Every March, when the housing lottery comes around, what students find the most daunting is not where they will be living, but rather who will be in their housing group. Finding a group can be one of the most stressful part of the housing process. What happens when you are just one person short of snagging a spot in Plimpton? Or what if your group is larger than the average suite? Here are all of the different housing options for groups of one to eight people at both Barnard and Columbia.

With the housing process underway, you might get a little confused about the differences between In-Person Group Selection and Online Selection. Not to worry though, we’ve got you covered. Here’s an overview of the specific differences between the In-Person Group and Online Selection processes.