Senior-profiles

Sitting inside the dark black box theater is a simple wooden structure—the bones of the house. Over the course of one weekend, this house will hold religious icons, a moonlit window, and the ghosts of women sacrificed in Greek mythology as three different stories come to life.

Commencement is in less than 40 days and finals end in fewer than 30 days. Despite this, Columbia has neither delivered on its promise of in-person activities leading up to Commencement, nor has it promised the class of 2021 any sort of in-person celebration once it is safe to do so.

Following the Ivy League’s decision to cancel winter sports at the beginning of the semester, 2020 was a roller coaster and a heartbreaking year for athletes at Columbia.

It might have been my worn-out DVD of Singin’ In the Rain or an all-consuming Hamilton infatuation (I swear, I liked it before it was cool), but somewhere in that span of time between birth and university, there was a spark in me that lit my passion for the theater.

Throughout the week, hundreds of Columbia students pass through the fourth floor of Riverside Church, where the Spectator offices are located. The green-striped walls lining the halls left of the elevator bank reveal rooms full of string lights, stained carpets, and students gathered over laptops while (probably) drinking leftover White Claws.

I went to Spectator’s open house during the spring of my first year, half on a whim, half propelled by the relentless anxiety that everyone else was doing something and I wasn’t. I didn’t know much about Spec besides that it was a student-run newspaper. I talked to the then-deputy editors of the Arts and Entertainment section and took some stickers. I applied, thinking that I like both art and writing, then soon joined the A&E trainee class of six (soon to be three) that spring.

“Huh, ok … so … why do you want to be publisher?”

When I was first admitted to Spectator as a sweaty, hopeful first year, I did not imagine myself shuffling through the cold in late fall two years later, crying into a lasagne.

I was a junior when the article from The Eye about how student organizations are addressing sexual assault came out. I found myself curled up in my Hewitt bed, crying into my pillow with the article open on my phone. I never got to the end.

Over the course of 2019, I vowed to remind myself to remember. I served as managing editor that year, and each day contained so much content, crises, and waking hours that sometimes I couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. So I set out on a simple project: at the end of each day, I wrote down one memory from the prior 24 hours, something that I thought I would want to look back on years down the line. I made a promise to myself not to read them again until after December came to a close—I considered it a retirement gift from me to me.