Anne-Marie gives us the secret hints for feeling confident in yourself, finding community in college, and locating abandoned rooms on campus post-9 pm!

Name, School, Major, Hometown: Anne-Marie Dillon, Columbia College, History, Harrison, NY

Claim to fame:

Fame is a fickle food (1702)

by Emily Dickinson:

Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate …

(Housing Equity Project, Lit Night, founder of Columbia University Next Tuesday no-brow film society)

Where are you going? Lots of different places, and fast. Reuniting with my beehives. Responding to my texts. I should go to the dentist this summer.

What are three things you learned at Columbia and would like to share with the Class of 2027?

  1. Columbia students have a bad habit of inventing bureacracies for themselves to inflate them into a play at power. Be brave and be a part of something where you actually do something—this can look like any number of things, even just making the decision to blow off homework to help a friend. Trust your instincts. Pick something you really care about and stick with it in some way, this is how community happens. Make the effort to maintain the places that matter to you, they don’t happen automatically. If you are excluded or rejected from something, start your own version and invite everyone. You cannot treat this time, or any period of your life, as a bus station. Or as a simple machine to catapult you into grand wealth or someplace else. Getting the degree alone may dramatically transform your circumstances, yes, but even then you have to look where you are as you fly. Try literally everything. Death to the myth of pre-professionalism! There is no activity or class or special society here that holds the secret key to your secure future. I am reminded of an amazing exchange between my parents in March 2020—Mom: “The future isn’t even promised to us anymore!” Dad: “What’s new?” 
  1. It can be easy to feel like you aren’t doing the right thing here. It can be easy to feel isolated, and that people are also somehow watching your every move. You are a precious gift to this school and the people who inhabit it. Don’t waste your time divining why you ended up at Columbia or if you’re really making the most of it, just do what feels most important to you that day. Follow your intuition. If this university feels impossibly crushing, know that there is always another way. As Professor Christopher Brown said to me in a History advising meeting: “It’s going to be okay. And even if this specifically isn’t going to be okay, it will be okay.” To save a life is to save the world entire. There are so many ways to live. Your big job during this time is to figure out how to live a life you not only bear, but love. You will endure difficult new things throughout college, and so will everyone else around you. Pay attention to when your peers are withdrawing from their worlds, don’t let each other slip through the cracks. Develop the courage required to be merciful, friendly, and kind. Graduation will come, the grades and awards will run out, and you will be left with you. Your hobbies, your memories, your community.
  1. You can have virtually any classroom or auditorium to yourself on campus from 9 pm onwards, without booking it. And there are rarely any cameras in them. Throw a party, start the club of your dreams, organize, have an acoustic concert. It is extremely difficult to ask for permission at this school and very easy to ask for forgiveness, but you probably won’t even have to. Apply for all of the different department prizes you can, you have nothing to lose and $$$ TO GAIN!  Do not be afraid to ask any professor for a recommendation, it is literally in their job description. Stay up all night with a friend and watch the sunrise over Morningside Park, learn the names of everyone you see every day, mix the JJ’s milkshakes with espresso, go to Dodge and sit in the sauna, go to a Community Board 7 or 9 meeting, be a guest on a WBAR or WKCR show, record a song in CU Records, use all of the giant colorful rolls of paper in USL, get free acupuncture from Columbia Health, stay overnight at the shelters HEP works with, go to Organ Meditation, give out as many Valentine’s cards as possible.

“Back in my day…” Housing Equity Project’s Direct Outreach was surreptitiously run out of a small network of John Jay and Shapiro minifridges, you were CAVA’d not CUEMS’d, Columbia had yet to expand its contract with Allied Universal Security, SOPHIE played Bacchanal, Conversio Virium was tying people up in the Barnard Movement Lab, the Union Theological Seminary courtyard was a beautiful place without the intrusion of a luxury highrise, if you were modeling for CU Artist’s Society you were completely naked, you found out about parties through Facebook, Ferris served Greek yogurt all day long, I had really short hair.

Favorite Columbia controversy?

When I became perhaps the first person to be CUEMS’D while working for CUEMS: I tore my back during a drill and had to be immediately loaded into my own ambulance by my colleagues. 

Also the professor who canceled class because she accidentally poisoned herself with “tincture of elderberry.”

What was your favorite class at Columbia?

American Renaissance with Branka Arsic

Corporate Behavior and Public Health with David Rosner

Buoyancy with Irena Haiduk

Contact Improvisation with Colleen Thomas

Judo with Sensei Michael Burr

Making Without Objects with Precious Okoyomon/Rirkrit Tiravanija

History of the South with Barbara Fields

Disability History in 20th Century Europe with Monika Baar

Critical Animal Studies with Janet Jakobsen

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? I loved learning how many people email Bwog to get their Senior Wisdom taken down for this question.

Whom would you like to thank?

The beautiful and constantly evolving Housing Equity Project, Thomas Merton, my various homes on 114th Street, everyone who encouraged me to take a COVID gap year, The Center Archive, Johnny at JJ’s and now Chef Don’s, WBAR, Sacred Music at St. Paul’s, Ford Hall, SNOCK, the revived Coffee Haus, Joe Lemay, everyone who ever read at Lit Night, everyone who ever came to Wood Auditorium for a screening, the Columbia Circus Collective, my housemates and roommates, my wise elder friends and even wiser younger friends, Ricardo at Community Impact, my mom and dad and brother and God :-)

One thing to do before graduating: “Hold fast to the spirit of youth, let the years to come do what they may.”—John Jay fireplace

Any regrets? No! I hope you’ve all felt as loved by me as I’ve felt by you.

Anne-Marie via Anne-Marie