Amidst all these teary, heartfelt Senior Wisdoms, we bring you an Actual (!) Wisdom from the one and only Associate Dean Jenkins. The “back in my day” is a lot more…back in the day.  

Justify your existence in 30 words or fewer. Gladly. I love my partner, my family, and my friends, I care deeply for my work and for my students, and I make a mean key lime pie.

Claim to fame. I won a dairy goat milking competition—speed and volume!—at the Sarasota County Fair in seventh grade. I also grew the biggest radish that year. Bow before me.

What’s your most valuable or unexpected college experience? Feeling like I wasn’t smart enough, or rich enough, to be at Columbia. Both feelings were pretty incapacitating at first, but learning how to overcome them—learning how to derive value from within myself rather than outside of myself—was the single most important thing I learned in college. Well… that and how to write a Lit Hum paper in two hours fueled by nothing but diet coke and shame.

Back in my day… A gallon of gas cost 79 cents, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head were a thing, and Queen released “Another One Bites the Dust.” Aaaaaand I’m old.

What’s the craziest student excuse/extension story you’ve heard? Over the past ten years, I have had students request extensions on assignments after claiming to have been attacked by the following animals: a feral dwarf hamster, a Dalmatian-Alaskan Malamute mix, a llama, and a swarm of Carniolan honey bees.

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? Does not compute.

What are three things you learned at Columbia?

1) The students at the School of General Studies are an inspiration. The privilege of working with them has been humbling and transformative in equal measure.

2) Riding the 1 train to work every day is soul-destroying. The chore of commuting via the MTA has been “OMG! Only in New York!” and “OMG! Stop drooling on me!” in equal measure.

3) The Registrar is a person, not a place.

What’s your advice to students/academics/the human race in general? My advice is inspired by a quote from George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” (1) Read Middlemarch. (2) Do what you can, as often as you can, to make life less difficult for one another.