Staff Writer Ajwah Qureshi details the struggles of NSOP as a first year.

It’s now three weeks into the semester. Am I the only one surviving off fumes, coffee, and adrenaline? Listen, I’m new to Columbia and to American university, so I attended as many NSOP activities as possible. I was up at 6 am and asleep at 1 am and still didn’t get to attend every event I wanted. The events don’t stop at the weekend, or one week into the semester. Guidebook notifications haunt my memory and every time I memorize a new part of campus, I feel that success soothing the frantic panic of NSOP.

NSOP is, without a doubt, one of the most important introductions to a new university and the amount of events available is unbelievable. But the struggle to keep up or even to pick what to do is something that still keeps me up at night. Can I remember what other options there were on the guidebook? Not necessarily. Do I still think about it? Of course, because there were just so many options!

It’s also the week to make friends, so everyone is out in their least wrinkled clothes, with their whitest smiles and strongest coffees. My Instagram followers have probably doubled, but I’d struggle to tell you anything about what I said to them or where I met them. My memories of that week are so scrambled. It’s also telling that most of the friends that I made were through random activities on the lawns and in the rare windows of opportunity for quiet chats away from everything else.

For people who already know the campus, or have settled into their accommodations, NSOP is brilliant. For people who are new to all of it, NSOP could use some slowing down, as well as fewer overlapping events so that we actually have a chance to go to them all and not crawl into bed at night almost in tears because classes begin in 4 hours and you’re not sure if you can wake up in time. Thank you, NSOP, for your insane amount of activities and for enabling my crippling coffee addiction that will use up all my limited Flex dollars. I’ll always have vague memories of singing “Roar Lion Roar” through the heat wave haze.

Low with balloons via Bwarchives.