studying

“HOLD FAST TO THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH. LET YEARS TO COME DO WHAT THEY MAY.” The quote, embossed in gold above the John Jay lounge’s fireplace, seems to be etched just as deep within our minds.

While there are some people who say there are never any open seats in Butler, there’s always space—you just have to wait long enough to find it. Stumble in after midnight and most of the crowds will be gone; you’ll begin to identify a pattern of people and phenomena that beholds itself to only its most devoted patrons.

As the first cycle of midterms comes to a close, you may be wondering how to improve upon your studying habits for the second round of midterms. And, even if you have done well on your midterms thus far, you may want to try, instead of studying harder, to study smarter. Well, not to fear, we’ve got your back.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all felt stuck in limbo, staring blearily out of a musky and dank library with a foggy headspace we can’t shake off. If you’re feeling unproductive, restless, and in search of a change of pace, you’ve come to the right place. Although Columbia is home to many libraries with various personalities, it’s totally OK to not want to spend the majority of your waking hours in one of them. Here’s a gentle reminder that there are plenty of other accessible options (within walking distance) around Morningside Heights for you to hunker down and power through all that work that’s been piling up.

We hate to break it to you, but we officially have less than ten class days left, which of course means that summer is just around the corner (yay!) but also that finals are fast approaching (boo!). We can totally understand if you’re feeling stressed and a little paralyzed just thinking about the workload. But if your study plan is to binge-watch Netflix and then pull a few consecutive all nighters in Butler, we’ll be blunt: That’s a guaranteed recipe for disaster. Instead, consider spacing things out a little this round by creating a study schedule. While we can’t guarantee success, we can promise you that with a study schedule, you’ll (hopefully) maintain better mental health during this trying season because you can at least rest assured that you’ve tried your best.

Columbia's campus is known to be a very high-pressure environment in which students often have to deal with difficult course loads and demanding extracurricular activities. In many demanding majors and pre-professional tracks, students use "study drugs" like Adderall to keep them going in preparation for rigorous assignments. Is the misuse of study drugs the future of intensive education or is their presence indicative of deeper faults in our education? What might those faults be?

At a school as stressful as Columbia, a pill with the power to keep you focused for hours has a strong appeal. Many students at Columbia pop some Adderall before hitting Butler, study longer, stay up later, and get more words on the page at the end of the day. Some may say that Adderall makes them feel “superhuman.” Fooled by the subjective experience of enhanced concentration, many students misguidedly believe that the drug reveals a superior state of mind. Yet even as a first-year, I have seen some of my closest friends abuse Adderall as they wrongfully normalize the drug as a convenient study aid.

In seven semesters at Columbia, I’ve been paid to take notes for five different classes. The email comes a week or two into the semester from the Office of Disability Services, offering $250 ($100 at Barnard) for a semester’s worth of notes that the office then sends weekly to a student in the class who needs them. When one such email landed in my inbox two days into my Elementary Latin I class in the fall of my first year, promising hundreds of dollars for something I already planned to do for myself, I sprinted to Butler to scan my notes and apply.

Noise levels are scaled 1 to 5. 1 meaning you are able to hear PrezBo’s toupee hit the floor in an empty Low Library, and 5 being Baker Field during the game-winning touchdown on Homecoming.

We’ve all been there. At some point during your time at Columbia, you’re going to pull an all-nighter for that one exam you “forgot” was coming up. Spectrum has closely examined the seven stages that accompany that fretful night-turned-morning, and have put together the all-nighter guide you never knew you needed (and wish you couldn’t relate to).