The Columbia-est space...to me, not you.

Trying to determine the Columbia-est space on our campus is like trying to convince someone there is a grocery-ist spot in Jewel. While I spend a lot of time perusing the baking aisle before I drag myself away to any other aisle, I wouldn’t insist to another person that a row of flour and sugar is the grocery-ist part of Jewel just because I spend a lot of time there. The grocery store has many different foods to offer, and anyone with a crumpled shopping list could have a favorite section. Columbia is a grocery store. A hypothetical grocery store. Students come to it, with a list of what they specifically want to get out of it, and they leave with those “items” (i.e skills, knowledge), and maybe some extra purchases that caught their interest along the way.

I came to Columbia with the intent to be a photography major. For a semester, my knowledge cart sat in an imaginary aisle stocked with lessons in color theory and shutter-speed techniques, and I spent hours each week in the real darkroom on the 8th floor of the 600 S. Michigan building. The constant smell of chemicals, the occasional “boom!” heard between the collision of two people in the pitch black room, this was my home. This was the Columbia-est spot, to me.

During my next semester, I started feeling a bit uneasy about my cart’s location, and I pushed it to the graphic design aisle. My old darkroom world was now across the store (or a block away), and I found myself sitting in the Design Computer lab in between classes, after classes, on the weekends. I now felt at home in the large, lime green and orange decorated space, among other students having problems with the Xerox B printer, and developing a love-hate relationship with the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator.

What the girl next to me in line for a Manifest t-shirt would pick as the Columbia-est space, would probably not be my choice. We probably don’t have the same major, we probably aren't pushing our carts along the same route—and that’s totally okay. The greatness of Columbia is that we all can choose what subjects we want to learn more about, or stop learning about, and in doing so, we find our own niche, or space, within the sprawling urban campus.