The Ten Ways of Knowing

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

It’s the first day of classes in 2006. I want to be a dentist, I’m sure. And a chemistry major. Shortly after a terrifying first General Chemistry lecture, I return to Altschul for Political Theory. Professor Dennis Dalton reads this quote aloud. It’s a Socrates maxim. It gets me thinking. Not too much, but still.

One evening the next week, I pass out supine, my chemistry textbook left open over my face. My roommate wakes me up at 8:30 p.m. and tells me it’s time for Spectator news training, an unofficial journalism course. Apparently I’d expressed interest in the newspaper during orientation week. Bleary-eyed, I dash into Barnard Hall just as the news training editor begins to gesticulate wildly while he describes finding Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s shoe in the trash on a stakeout.

I don’t know what I’m doing. In fact, I don’t do much. But the training editor says I need to take an assignment. Ever the obedient first-year, I agree to write an article. It’s not good. But thanks to a few supportive editors who make sure I don’t quit, I become addicted. I love asking questions, all kinds of questions. I relish telling others’ stories.

I’m a sophomore. I know about carbon and epoxides and chair-chair configurations. But by now, I know more about hate crimes and gifted-and-talented education and Low Library and Pakistan and tenure. I mumble less.

It’s February. I tell my parents my own breaking news: I don’t want to be a dentist. I’m a reporter now. I can no longer envision a future in which my closest human contact involves my hands in someone’s mouth.

This news doesn’t go over well. It takes the prodding of a Wall Street Journal special projects reporter for my parents to let me go to St. Louis for a reporting internship. I get off the plane in the Midwest. My notebook becomes an appendage. I’ve gone through many. They fill my top drawer.

Week after week, still an undeclared chem major, I spend five-hour periods shattering test tubes before I realize I’d rather be learning something else, something less technical. After some self-reflection, I become an English major. I fall in love with Chaucer, then Shakespeare. I fall in love with Barnard’s English department. Writing becomes blissful, though I’m told my paragraphs are too short.

As a reporter, I interview Bill Nye, Jeffrey Sachs, and Alan Brinkley. I interview Lee Bollinger and Fatima Bhutto and Joe Biden. I scoop some New York outlets, and the rush is thrilling. I have a front-row seat to the show that is life at Columbia University, and find myself at the eye of various storms—hate crimes, McBama, and an array of administrative fracases. I ask more questions. I learn sleep is overrated.

I’m a junior, and Spec seems like it could grow and improve its community relations. As one professor who will never be quoted in these pages wrote me, the newspaper could use some “serious soul-searching.” So I run for editor in chief, a process that involves writing a 20-page document on the future of this institution and a grilling by editors. My non-Spec friends keep me sane.

Instead of editor in chief, I become campus news editor. I work with Betsy to make the paper come out. Miraculously, it does. Every day. I got lucky, actually. I made an incredible friend. Besides, I’m a reporter, not a CEO. Always make lemonade.

Before writing this, I look back at the senior columns of those who came before me. They had memories of Ben & Jerry’s and late-night chats about newspapers by the Sundial. I have memories of bubbles in the office and corrections and Sporcle and people and Starbucks. I remember dealing with people who aren’t rational. You compromise and talk and grow.

My last semester, I train new writers. The Diana opens. I work on one last project, “Finding Bollinger,” a massive profile of Columbia’s president. Jake and I poll everyone we find who’s known the man. I make my last interview rounds with the administrators I’ve come to know. PrezBo even lets us embed with him a bit.

Finally, we hunker down in Spec’s conference room for 15 hours. We write and write and write. After four years, we could write a book. We settle for 7,023 words. We think we find Bollinger. And maybe something more.

Today, I pass the sinister silver bleachers on the steps. They’ll shoo us out soon. My thumb brushes my newest ring. I get a bit choked up.

Now it’s Saturday night. The neon pink sun vanishes beyond the Hudson, behind the rooftops and house-shaped chimneys that punctuate the evening sky. I only have 17 of these sunsets left. Since I can’t capture this one with a camera, I frame it with tears. The hydrogen bonds in water are strong—that much I remember from chemistry. Maybe they’ll keep the image intact.

The author is a Barnard senior with a major in English and a minor in political science. She served as an associate editor on the 131st news board, a deputy editor on the 132nd news board, campus news editor on the 133rd managing board, and staff training editor, copy staffer, senior staff writer, and staff photographer on the 134th board.