Senior Vignettes

By The Class of 2026

Illustration by Em Bennett

John Jay

Evan Rossi

Columbia’s campus is filled with symbols. There are the obvious ones—Alma Mater, Scholar’s Lion, the Crown—and the ones whose meanings need to be teased out. For this senior vignette, I was tempted to find a campus location that would neatly encapsulate these particular four years. I began to take images from daily life and consider what symbols they could become. I thought about transience as I walked across Law Bridge, past the blooming cherry blossoms and over the straight shot of Amsterdam that connects Chelsea Market to Highbridge Park. I thought about closure, barricades, and renewal as I saw the years-long construction in Kent Hall and remembered the brief times I had studying in the beautiful C.V. Starr East Asian Library. 

With these pat images filling my mind, I found that the most meaning I could find on campus was not to be created anew but merely re-collected from my first dorm: John Jay. Sweatily bounding down the building’s stairwell on moving day, I met my first college friend. The whole year, in JJ’s Place, we stayed up too late arguing about which character from LitHum was the hottest. In the 13th floor lounge, a borderless, ever-shifting group of friends and acquaintances formed while listening to Ed Sheeran’s music for hours (that’s right, Ed Sheeran). His songs tapped into the nervous energy of the moment: 18-year-olds newly arrived in the big city, unsure how to fit in, torn between the comfort of home and the vital possibility of the new. As we sang along to lyric videos, we forgot about that insistent thought that told us that we alone were feeling that bubbly mix of fear and anticipation. Now, on the threshold of a new beginning, I think about how that place was a symbol of the new life we were creating together. 

Riverside Park

Kate Sibery

People talk about crying on the subway—the anonymity of it—but I’ve never found myself in tears on the 1. I prefer a silent cry walking through Riverside, going past the dogs and trees and playgrounds. Riverside is where I go when I’m looking to be alone, but also hoping that I might run into someone. There is of course the labyrinth of Central Park, but sometimes all I want is to walk in a straight line with a clear view of the Hudson. It is the place I return to again and again, not only to cry, but also to think, to be by the river or beneath the trees as the seasons change. Right now the park is bright green, which seems to have happened overnight. 

I am a sentimental person by nature, and so I’m sure there are many places on campus that, over the next weeks and months, I’ll find myself missing or at least thinking about with a hint of (perhaps preemptive) nostalgia. But I miss Riverside already, looking at it now through my bedroom window. It is the best backyard I’ve ever had. 

Low Steps in Front of East Lawn

Sayuri Govender

We heard news that morning of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Videos came from late the night before of students moving throughout campus, coalescing into the East Lawn, bubbling with excitement, connection. In response, outside my dorm window were dozens of NYPD cars inched all the way down 116th.  Yet a galvanizing combination of exhilaration and outrage was leaking from the suddenly locked gates, followed with an invitation to come—come keep your friends safe and watch for the cops, we keep us safe. My friends and I bundled up, swiped into campus wearing thick gloves, and we joined the perimeter march around the lawns. 

At 10 p.m., hundreds of us were still gathered around, our collective rage and grief now held within a community of outstretched hands. We repeated the chants we had been learning since last semester, not yet knowing the way they would become swallowed and second-nature within the coming weeks. I looked as those in the encampment danced around, joyfully steadfast, cheered us on as we cheered them. As it got later, it started to clear out. Alongside the few dozens of students left, I sat with my friends on the little steps in front of the lawn. We passed around fruit and granola bars, hesitantly grabbed a warm pizza slice–asking, was everyone else fed? I rested my head on my friend’s legs, huddled under her large windbreaker to keep warm. The damp air was quieter now. The moon was about to be full—I remember. It would be at its brightest a few nights later. I would look up at it, journaling on the sundial next to Ceci and Andrea and the scent of palo santo, thinking about newness. Thinking about the shielding blankets I held up with 10 other hands around those doing daily prayer, thinking about the martyred names that littered the flags on the shrubs, thinking about how little 100 tents felt in comparison to the photos and videos of the camps coming out of Gaza, the Palestinian children and families we wanted so badly to do right by, so badly to have the world see too.  

But before then, on that first night, looking out with my tired but peeled eyes, I remember how we sat together, arms interlinked and warmed by everyone around us—how we were buzzing. 

110th and Riverside Drive

Cecilia Zuniga 

I sometimes forget that I’ve run a half marathon. It was the spring of 2024, and I was routinely waking up in a puffer jacket and three layers of pants, forked between my friends still curled up in their sleeping bags. Cracks of morning light would stream through the tent edges and wriggling outside, I’d find myself slightly damp from the cold earth beneath me. I’d walk wearily to my dorm, change into running clothes, make the swirling tree-lined descent into the park at 110th and Riverside Drive—always beginning and ending my run in the same place. I couldn’t tell if my muscles ached from sleeping on the ground for two weeks, or from the 8-mile run I’d done the two days before. I trained throughout that spring, and ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon on April 28, 2024. Two days later, the University greenlit the NYPD to storm Hind’s Hall, unleashing their drawn weapons and flash-bang grenades onto my peers for demanding an end to Palestinian genocide. 

110th and Riverside Drive feels like leaving and coming back, a circular return to the same point over and over and over. It is a place that reminds me of embarking on a 10-mile run without headphones, meditating furiously on the present and vowing to never let myself forget: the totalizing force of the University’s repression; the ugly certainty that it will protect trustee interests above anything else; the warmth and abundance I found within the Gaza Solidarity Encampments; the principled resolve of my peers and the profound resilience of the Palestinian people. 

I suppose I was so wrapped up in remembering this that I’ve forgotten much else. 

South Lawn, West

Chris Brown 

I’ve spent a lot of time on Columbia’s lawns. Over the last four years, I’ve always lived somewhere on 114th Street (or very close by), and so Butler Lawns have always been my most accessible green space. I’ve played nearly every ball sport possible on them. I have written about them. I had my first real snowball fight on them. Soon, they’ll host my family as I graduate. There is always a sense of urgency between the first sunny days of Spring and the day the lawns close for Commencement setup. Everyone knows that they have to take advantage of those few moments of grass and joy. 

…

The morning after the encampments were cleared, I made the walk from Hartley to Lerner. The night before, I had watched from my eighth-floor window as the police flooded the lawns and removed any trace of the protests. It was a Wednesday, and the first day of May. Ferris was closed, and almost nobody was on campus. Not knowing where else to go, I found myself on the bench facing the lawn. It was quiet, and I sat with a friend and looked out over the grass, mostly destroyed by the activity of the previous night and month.  

…

On a sunny day in early April, I returned to the West Lawn. I was with that same friend, throwing a baseball back and forth. We knew that it would soon be time for the grass to become steel bleachers again. Maybe this would be the last time that we’d throw the ball there. The lawns held no trace of what had once happened there, nearly two years before. But they still hold those memories for me. Every four year cycle of students gets to make those lawns their own, but for me, and for us, they were community. 

The Trolls (2016) Poster at W. 113th St. 

Rocky Rūb

There’s a Trolls (2016) poster above the parking lot at W. 113th in the middle of the cross street between Broadway and Riverside. It was pointed out to me by Carolyn and Liam (my audience of two), and functions similarly to the “Room of Requirement” at (TERF) Hogwarts (f*ck JK Rowling); it only appears to those with the imaginative capacity for it, and is the only litmus test that I’ve found to be 100% accurate in determining someone’s vibe—that and if they still shop at Morton Williams. 

The poster itself hangs above a makeshift, concrete stoop at the entrance of the parking lot that I’m sure my fellow ex-residents of 600 W. 113th st (Nuss) are familiar with. And it’s on this stoop, under Poppy’s watchful gaze (voiced by Anna Kendrick), that I came into myself as a young adult. Every night of my sophomore year ended here over Columbia Dining coffee cups filled with Yellow Tail chardonnay or a half-smoked joint, unspooling the day’s gossip into comedic monologues and impromptu improv. For instance, when I explained to Carolyn how I had a prophetic vision for a potential screenplay idea, only to realize at the end of the plot description that this was the same story as 13 Going On 30 (2004). Or, when we spent three hours laughing for so long that a woman who lived next to the lot came outside in a fuzzy robe and slippers, poured wine into a tea cup, lit a cigarette, and shouted over to us, “Heard there’s a party out here!”

And now, I feel a particular nostalgia for the night before my twentieth birthday, when I sat under Trolls Poster while I crashed out over my teen (twink) ego death. My dad called me and told me about the day he realized, in real time, that his childhood was ending. It was the last day of summer and he was 11, and after going door to door throughout his neighborhood, he eventually submitted to the fact that no one was free to play. He sat on the concrete curb in front of his house, head in his hands, and thought, “So this is it?” 

I share my dad’s juvenile proclivity for the extreme, and assume a similar position on the concrete stoop in front of this parking lot. If this is it, I’m glad it happened here. 

Math Library Stacks 

Erica Lee 

When you enter Math Library, just keep walking. Past the spines of books presumably filled with equations, theorems, and proofs, the library will open up to a set of individual desks nestled along the wall between windows looking out on Earl Hall. In the stacks, the air is always silent and still, weighted down by the scent of dust and pages. Light filters in, settling across scratched wooden surfaces with complete indifference. I prefer the desks on the right-hand side, where I can watch students and professors ascend and descend through the Earl Hall campus entrance from an anonymous shadow. 

I discovered the Math stacks as a sophomore, when helicopters would circle campus and everyone had known each other long enough to start falling out. I rarely see anyone there, at least never anyone that I know. When every library, dining hall, and building seems to propagate the watchful eye of Columbia, there’s safety in the lack of surveillance. It’s not that the area is hidden, exactly, but overlooked. Hidden things invite discovery; overlooked things remain untouched. Suspended between the certainty of the stacks and the motion outside the windows, I had found a place where I was untouchable. 

As I leave Columbia, anonymity will stop being the exception and start being the rule. I wonder if I’ll miss the familiarity that once felt suffocating, or if I’ll keep searching for another quiet corner where I can disappear on my own terms—my next Math stacks.

Alma Mater 

Schuyler Daffey

On a warm evening in early September of 2022, I sat beneath Alma Mater, listening to the opening strains of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” play from someone’s phone, with a few people I had met just days before on a COOP bus headed into the woods. It was late and the sky was completely dark, save for the warm lights of Butler glowing across the way, and despite the witching hour, everyone seemed to want to linger, unwilling to leave each other. These days, I’m not in close contact with them, nor do we see each other around campus as often as we did in those frantic initial weeks at Columbia. But I like to think that we each treasure that night, those stumbling, nervous conversations, as wide-eyed freshmen. 

Undoubtedly, Alma has seen a lot, these past four years and beyond, all the way back to her installation in 1903. She has cast her proud, watchful gaze over countless graduations, protests, and changes of the guard. And of myself, she’s watched me eat takeout sandwiches sprawled on Low steps, don sunglasses to tan on warm days, haul myself up to stand beside the statue on her raised dais in an ebullient, laughing post-barcrawl haze. 

When I think of my little brother who’ll step onto campus as a student in the fall, I wonder if he’ll sit on that balustrade, in this same place I once did, just in a different era of Columbia history. The class of 2026 will be gone. All that remains of us will be a Blue Note on a website somewhere, or the initials scrawled under the loose floorboard of an EC suite. I wonder what clubs he’ll join, whether he’ll live in the same dorms or frequent the same study spots. He’ll be beset by new, unprecedented challenges, overwhelmed by the impossibility of doing everything there is to do in a city as impossibly full as this one. But I like the idea that ultimately we’ll both have sat here, he and thousands of other students to come, gazing at the neoclassical majesty of Butler and the city spread out like an invitation beyond, marveling at how special, how right, it feels to be here, on this night, a freshman at Columbia.

An Alcove in NoCo

Tara Zia

On a snowy day in January, I emerged from our EC suite into the latest storm and went on a walk with two of my roommates. One of them mentioned that she knew of a lookout spot at the top of NoCo Library—somewhere she had lab ID access to. We climbed up the stairs and settled into the alcove looking out over the campus, our clothes damp and skin raw. The lights from buildings beyond 116th and Broadway flickered, and barely visible figures darted across the icy paths. This winter was harsh, but in that alcove, the tear-inducing wind we had all gotten used to made the warmth feel deserved.

Growing up with loved ones all over the world (along with seminal films like Love Actually) has taught me to appreciate the anticipation of airport arrivals areas: the scanning of crowds for a familiar face or coat. Senior year has felt a bit like that: a long arrivals area, scanning for something we couldn't yet hold onto. But in that NoCo stairwell, and even now, I can’t remember exactly what I was looking towards, only who I shared my anticipation with.

Hartley 2C4

Justin Chen

My mother and father never graduated from high school, let alone college. Under the immense fear of remaining trapped at the University of Rhode Island and uncertain of how I would pay for the next year, I desperately sought a new beginning. So, when I transferred to Columbia College, I had never seen the campus until after my enrollment. Trekking with my mother and aunt up the countless staircases, we dragged boxes of my “unnecessary” trinkets into Hartley 2C4. After finishing this straining labor, we walked to the low steps, in awe at the view of Butler. Filled with a newfound hope, I stared up at Low Library, surrounded by falling pink blossoms, thinking about the next three years. Suddenly, my aunt tripped. A security guard watched unfazed as we scoured the rotunda for a first-aid kit, blood dripping from my aunt’s left elbow. 

After she was patched up, we said our goodbyes. My aunt and mother told me, laughing, there was no need to worry, slipping me a red envelope before driving off. It was only years later that I learned her injury required extensive physical therapy. That first night, as I stared at the ceiling of my walk-through double, I began sobbing in the darkness. I felt the weight of it all: a profound guilt for not being able to save my aunt from a fall, and unworthy of my place in this institution. My room became my solace, not only because it was my new home, but because it reminded me of the people I loved. In my silence, I thought of my grandfather tilling land, my aunt sewing clothing six days a week, and my father sweating in the back of a Chinese-American restaurant. 

At my desk, I put up family photos of our backyard garden, the last reunion in Canada, and the Crystal Mall, which shut down this past month. I could not stop her fall that day. Nor could I ease the years of generational labor that brought my family to this moment. But in Hartley 2c4, I began to understand what I could do: I could stay. I could endure. I could make their sacrifices mean something. And for the first time, that felt like enough.