keys-to-success

Dearest Online Learning,

“We all are roses. I think we’re all these beautiful plants waiting to emerge from the soil,” Mamadou Yattassaye, CC ’21, said when asked about the rose imagery in his debut album, “To Stitch a Rose.”

Until quite recently, I had never really been anywhere. New York is a cluttered place where everything I could ever need is in the palm of my hand.

In the span of only a few weeks, many of us were asked to evacuate our campus, as classes moved online and annual events—including Commencement—were canceled for the first time in centuries. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, students, alumni, faculty, community members, and more have engaged in spirited debate over how universities have responded to a public health threat that will impact global communities for years to come. The opinion section is still committed to our mission of providing a fair and equal representation of campus discourse. It is even more important now than ever to hear from you—as our words can bring us closer together while we are in isolation.

A doctor receives a call in his car. He picks up his phone and hears a shy, young voice inquiring about the age at which you can get gender reassignment surgery. The doctor replies that in New York City, you have to be 18 years old. The young voice belongs to a 14-year-old.

I overhear people talking. Conversations filter through the walls in the residence halls or echo in the Hamilton stairwells. I usually don’t pay too much attention to what is said, trying not to listen in on conversations to which I was not invited. But, when ideas become repeated, reverberating around the campus, I think it becomes important to keep track of where these ideas are coming from and which lexicons are at play.

I brace myself for rejections, and I brace myself for the success of others.

On a Sunday night in October, air crisp from an afternoon of rain, the 19 current members of Notes and Keys ventured up to the Broadway Sky Lounge (even the place they rehearse sounds swanky!) for rehearsal.