Name, school: Michael Snyder, CC

Claim to fame: Amongst friends, amateur gastronome; general enthusiasm for wine, gin, bitters, and pork products; general antipathy toward vegans. Secondarily, campus theater.

Where are you going? Staying in the city for the summer, then moving to Santiago, Chile in August for six months to write for The Santiago Times. After that, the future is unclear, but ideally I plan to live nomadically for a couple of years before returning to the States to do graduate work in English literature.

Three things you learned at Columbia:

  1. People who live in Butler and make a point of telling you just how much work they have to do are miserable and boring and not any smarter than you are.
  2. In every class there is someone really irritating, and someone who speaks rarely but profoundly—often many of the former, rarely more than one of the latter. No exceptions.
  3. 5 o’clock is cocktail hour, no matter where you are or what else you have to do.

Justify your existence in 30 words or fewer: I’d rather not.

Any war stories from the War on Fun? I had a beer confiscated on the Steps once by a public safety officer. Then again, at least once a semester I’ve had someone ask if the beverage in my brown bag is alcoholic and take my word for it when I’ve said ‘nope,’ not to mention the number of times my suspiciously hand-rolled smoking implements have been quietly overlooked in public. All in all I’ve come out relatively unscathed.

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? Imagine oral sex at 90. Valdeón and Stilton last a lifetime.

Any advice for the Class of 2014?

  1. Go to office hours; most professors want to interact with students and are incredibly personable.
  2. Go abroad.
  3. Stay in the city every summer if you possibly can (unless following my above advise and going abroad).
  4. Have a sense of classroom decorum—silence in seminars is a waste; speaking too much in lectures is presumptuous.
  5. Invest in good liquor.
  6. Never use the word ‘problematize.’

Any regrets? I didn’t stick with my foreign language after high school, and I absolutely should have. Otherwise, there are some classes I wish I’d taken, a few I wish I hadn’t, but no—when push comes to shove I don’t think I’d do anything differently.