General Studies students, you have my heart. 

Dear whoever GS student may be reading this, 

I love you. Not like that, sorry. But I do love you. 

I’m 19 years old. All of my friends here are within a few years of that. Sometimes it gets exhausting, being around people who are my age all the time. Yes, everybody at Columbia is smart, but I miss being around the wisdom that only comes from age. A little part of me trusts older people a little more, feels a different sense of comfort when interacting with them. Although I’m technically an adult now, I still feel like a kid who gets chosen to sit at the grown-ups table during Thanksgiving whenever I interact with an older GS student. I feel a special sense of camaraderie with them, timidly delighted that they chose to talk to me. 

I set aside a certain sort of admiration for GS students that I don’t find applicable to my peers at Columbia College, SEAS, or Barnard. The latter three undergraduate schools, myself included, are all at Columbia because college was the progression expected between high school and fully independent, career-seeking life. For most of us, we didn’t really consider an alternate path. We’d been in school our whole lives—a lot of us even choose to pursue it past the undergraduate level, simply because it’s familiar. Yes, I like my classes. Yes, my friends do too! But we complain, we wear our fatigue on our sleeves, and we trudge through each day counting down the time until the next academic break. 

With this experience, it astonishes me how GS students chose to come here. Would I choose to go back to school for four years after, let’s say, 10 years of working and living on my own? I highly doubt it, and that’s probably the case for the rest of my peers too. GS students just have so much outward passion and drive that I myself, as grateful as I am to be here, can’t seem to sustain. In my few semesters here, I’ve noticed that when my course has an older GS student in it, they’re always one of my most enthusiastic, participating classmates. How do they not get exhausted being so inquisitive and conversational every single class? How is this energy maintained the whole semester? I truly don’t know. What baffles me even more is how some GS students act this way when they literally have a job and/or children. Do their days contain 48 hours? The more I think about it, the more I’m simultaneously awestruck and intimidated. I feel like I have a resting bitch face sometimes, and I work less than 10 hours a week and have zero children! And to think GS students have to cook, too…

One last thing I really love about GS students is that they always have really cool stories to share. In one of my classes this semester, a GS student shared a selfie he took when he was flying a fighter jet for his aerobatic team. Another GS student in one of my classes has work experience in the exact field I want to go into after graduation. Last semester, the GS student I sat near had a dog! I got to feed her treats and pet her and everything! The dog, not the student, by the way. 

If you’re a GS student and you’re reading this, know that I want to give you a hug. You’re the best and it scares me how amazing you are. I don’t know how you function or why, but you do, and you brighten all of our days in the process!

Love, 

Yours truly

Every GS student and I via Bwarchives.