Memories tagged “Winter”

A Texan’s First Winter at Columbia My first winter at Columbia was a big shock to my system. I was a Freshman all the way from Texas, and had absolutely no idea what I was in for. I was a...

Columbia College 2004

Acorns and Tai Chi I have a few Furnald stories. I remember once making my bed late one morning and finding an acorn in the sheets. Thinking nothing more than, “That’s weird,” I threw it out the window and shut...

Columbia College 1990

Adoption It was a cold, rainy day in Novemebr. I stood at the corner of 115th, heading to noon Mass at Notre Dame church. My cell phone rang. I answered it. A woman from DCFS was calling asking about a...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 2002

Advice to My Columbia-Bound Self Reconsider the nose ring. You’ll like it for a few years, but in the end your mother will be proven right. Break up with him. He’s a nice boy, but you two have practically nothing...

Columbia College 1999

Busta Rhymes Concert I was only a senior in high school, visiting my future alma mater. It was pouring, but the steps were packed with black umbrellas and plastic ponchos. And there was Busta Rhymes jamming in front of us....

Columbia College 2002

Columbia Universtiy and Orhan Pamuk Columbia University and Orhan Pamuk October 24, 2006 Columbia Universtiy in New York City became home to two new Nobel Laureates early in October this year when Prof. Edmund Phelps won the prize in economic...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1964, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 1970

Coping with Winter at Columbia No problemo.* I commuted from home on Long Island while getting my masters at Columbia. Never outside for more than a minute - from house to car, from car to LIRR station - from subway...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1960

Eggs and Sausage During the middle 70s, the Morningside Heights neighborhood, especially Broadway, was just beginning to change. A College student with meager resources still had a number of choices of fine, inexpensive places to eat and drink. The College...

Columbia College 1977

Extended Winter Parking in NYC Every permanent and temporary New Yorker knows about the difficulty of finding parking in NYC - SIPA graduate students are no exception. Having grown up in nearby New Jersey, I enjoyed the advantage of having...

School of International and Public Affairs 1996

Favorite Place to Study My favorite place to study for second semester exams was in front of the library, on the grass. There was beautiful music always playing over a loud speaker. The weather was wonderful after the cold winter....

School of Dental and Oral Surgery 1961

Freshman Week Hosting: Opening a Door At the start of my senior year, my Freshman Week host duties mainly involved meeting each night with several dozen fresh-faced denizens of an upper floor of Carman Hall. At 11:30 p.m. they were...

Columbia College 1972, School of Law 1977

Furnald Fun Who doesn’t have a story about the dorms? I remember trekking up all those flights of stairs in my Columbia boxers to move into Carman 13, the band that practiced down the hall and only seemed to know...

Columbia College 1995

Furnald Snowball Fight - 8th takes on 7th If I’m not mistaken, it was one of the President’s holidays in February of my senior year. I was the 8th floor residence counselor with a room right across from the TV...

Columbia College 1978

Getting Snowed in at Columbia Coming from Chicago, I was pleasantly surprised at the mildish winters in NY. It got cold, but not the bitter icy winds of the midwest. The best part was that when it actually snowed, the...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 2004

Gospel! During the winter and spring, numerous students and parents packed Altschul Auditorium in SIPA to hear the joyous and triumphant sounds of the Barnard-Columbia Gospel Choir. Some of my fondest memories of Columbia are of directing the choir with...

Teachers College 1990, Columbia College 1989

How I Kept Warm at Columbia: Revised As I put myself through Columbia via loans, work, and other forms of “creative financing,”* I had relatively limited resources with which to keep myself warm during the long, cold, and dark winter...

School of General Studies 2003

How I Kept Warm (or Not) Coming from mild, wet Portland, Oregon to the College in 1969, I was totally unprepared for an East Coast winter. My typical clothing consisted of cotton socks, blue jeans, flannel shirt, an Army surplus...

Columbia College 1973

How I Kept Warm During my first year at Columbia I lived in Ruggles Hall. The main steam pipe went right through my room. It was so warm that I had to keep the window cracked open all winter long....

School of Law 1983

How to Prepare for Winter at Columbia My answer is short but true: spend four undergraduate years at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire – winter at Columbia, in balmy New York, seems almost tropic in comparison. Everything in life...

Graduate School of Business 1968

IT’S SNOWING I experienced snow “for the first time again” when, at my freshman dorm (John Jay), the whole floor went out to baptize my next door roommate (who was from India) with a good old fashioned snowball fight. We...

Columbia College 1989

John Jay Allegiance I began my Columbia tutelage on John Jay 11, room 1127, to be exact. I will always remember move-in day - maneuvering those bulky, orange moving bins from the elevator to my little slice of Columbia. My...

Columbia College 2003

Junior Year Abroad in Rome “What are you going to DO with it?” is a question all Latin majors hear a hundred times. All I can reply is, at age 56, I’m gainfully employed and have never missed a meal....

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1971, Columbia College 1970

Keeping Warm in NYC Winters can get pretty cold in New York, with the wind whistling down the canyons of the streets and avenues. With Columbia’s proximity to the Hudson River, an added chill off the water adds to the...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1976

Late Nites and Early Mornings In the architecture program, everybody has to stay up late to meet impossible deadlines. The result of that is a bond among fellow students that makes the studio atmosphere so unique. You spend every night...

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 2004

Law to Layman Karl Llewelen, jurisprudence prof, left class after his point was made. 30 mins, 20 mins or whatever time it took. “Law to layman is a person walking down the street who looks up to see marble steps...

School of Law 1948

Look Up My spiritual experience at Columbia was, in a word: awful. Before becoming a student at Columbia I was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church. I grew up in Huntington, Long Island, New York. This was a great...

School of General Studies 1978

My Columbia Summers During my summer vacations at Columbia, I tried to do anything that would be good for my future career. But since my goals changed every summer, I wound up doing something different each time. After my freshman...

Columbia College 2005

My Dorms My first dorm room was in John Jay. It was not so cold during the winter break compared to my friend’s room behind the FBH building. JJ is very private environment. Not much chance to bump into others....

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1997

My Strangest Library Experience It was a cold February afternoon. Actually, as all Columbians know, there are few February afternoons around campus that are anything but cold. So it’s probably sufficient to say that it was a February afternoon. I...

School of General Studies 2003

My Thesis or My Life During graduate school, I lived on the 29th floor of Haven Tower 2 at the Health Sciences campus. One winter morning, around 4am, one of my three apartment-mates burst into my bedroom and told me...

School of Public Health 1997

NYC Cold In response to your call for anecdotes regarding weathering the NYC cold… As a native Texan, I was grossly unprepared for the NYC cold (circa 1983, when I began college there). This was particularly challenging for me as...

Columbia College 1987

NYC Winters New York City is known for its diversity in people, places, and styles. When moving here, after growing up in a small town in the midwest, I thought that learning about all the different ways of life would...

Columbia College 2004

Oddly Collegial In the fall of 1986 I somewhat reluctantly entered the School of Library Service. In the five years since graduating college, I had considered law, theater, journalism, wildlife ecology and clown school. I’d worked in libraries through college...

School of Library Service 1987

Old Hells I Have Known (“I’m with you in Rockland”) down Baltimore Avenue, West Philadelphia grey winter twilight stone obelisk in the graveyard shrieks catches my eye and jerks it jerks my eye to the cemetery ominous stone finger brooding...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 1980

Running for Warmth Coming to Columbia from Cleveland in 1984, I was pleasantly surprised to find the temperature relatively balmy in New York, with the buildings trapping heat and generally knocking down the wind. So after growing up on the...

Columbia College 1988

Scowl (A Lament, with Apologies to Allen Ginsberg) Scowl (A Lament, with Apologies to Allen Ginsberg) I. I’ve seen the best minds of my generation silenced by manufactured fear, Banalized by materialist want, marginalized by a creeping sense of anomie,...

Columbia College 1975, School of International and Public Affairs 1991

Seeing Snow for the First Time I was a freshman from Hawaii, and had never before left the islands. The cooler temperatures of Fall 1966 were certainly a new experience for me. But I will never forget sitting in one...

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science 1971

September 12, 2001 I was in my apartment, one block from Ground Zero, when two planes destroyed my neighborhood. My husband and I (who, incidentally, had gotten married in Columbia’s Chapel) walked uptown seven miles to his mother’s house. The...

School of the Arts 2001

Shivering at Columbia Arriving at JFK in January of my first year at Columbia, just back from the winter holidays, the flight attendant announced that it was -35 degrees with the wind chill in New York. At first, I hoped...

Columbia College 2003

Show Time My strangest and possibly my fondest memory in the Columbia library took place late one night during the cold month of February. I was studying in the large room in the back for my orgo test the following...

Columbia College 2005

SILENCE & LIGHT I remember two experiences which happened before, and after my graduation at Columbia. Although both were secular events I remember them as profound and at least for me religious experiences. The first experience was an individual one....

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation 1993

Ski Jump on Low Steps After a once-in-a-decade snowstorm in the heart of New York, my teammates and I decided (brilliantly, I might add) to venture with our ski gear out to the Low library steps. After all, we weren’t...

Columbia College 2003

Sledding on the Lowe Steps How we kept warm in the winter: we would borrow lunch trays from the cafetorium when we got a good snow, and sled down the Steps. It was fun, and challenging. Those trays don’t offer...

Columbia College 1998

Snowed In If I could relive one day in my experience at Columbia it would be a day in February 2003 when school was cancelled because of a heavy snow storm. I think the central campus was more active that...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 2007

Southern Californian Not Ready for Real Cold My reaction to the first cold days I experienced in Morningside Heights were a little like Dorothy’s initial response to being in Oz: “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” In fact, I...

Columbia College 1962

Staying Warm A daily endeavor in the New York winters. Layering…that was the key. Hopefully, the snow was new or maybe if I was lucky there would be no snow at all. Because if it was one of those days...

School of Dental and Oral Surgery 2004

Support in the Big City When I arrived at Columbia I was a 20 year old from a dairy farm in Western Pennsylvania. The Lutheran student organization provided me with friends with interests apart from the medical center. It also...

School of Nursing 1970

Surviving NY Winters The hardest part of Columbia winters was rowing on the Harlem River. Although the crew rowed in indoor tanks in the basement of Low Library during the coldest months, we would be back out on the river...

Columbia College 1960

Surviving the Winter Growing up in California, my father was a fresh air fanatic. He insisted that you should always sleep with a window slightly ajar for some fresh air. That worked fine in California, but it created some problems...

Columbia College 1988, Teachers College 1992

T.E.R. Singer’s Class It was a very hot day in June, 1959. We all were seated in Butler Hall, on the top floor, waiting for the professor to arrive. There was no air conditioning, and no fan in the room....

School of Library Service 1962

The Big Chill - Surviving Winter I wrap a headband around my ears and put a hat on, along with gloves and a scarf and a really warm and waterproof coat. Then hit the streets, slopes, or whatever!!

Columbia College 1996

The Big Chill Are you kidding? “Big Chill??” I came to the College from Minnesota, where men are men and only whooses put on parkas when the temp drops below zero (Fahrenheit). Winters in New York City were a tropical...

Columbia College 1965

The Day Ball Points Got a Chilly Reception No, not now. Not here. Not in the middle of the street in the middle of the winter that had set a then-record in New York City for most snowfall. As a...

Graduate School of Journalism 1996

The Lows and Highs of Campus Beauty An urban university campus is not the first place in the world that comes to mind when I think of locations that have the capability to move the soul, but Columbia has these...

Columbia College 1990

The Prettiest Part of Campus Columbia has a beautiful campus. In particular, the view from the windows of the East Asian Library looking out at night onto the lighted trees in winter is breathtaking.

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences 2005, School of General Studies 2002

The Thrill (and Agony) of Winter at Columbia As a member of the Women’s Swim Team at Columbia from 1983-1987, I vividly recall both the thrill and agony of the arrival of wind, snow and ice on the CU campus....

Columbia College 1987

Unusual Memory of the Columbia Library Fresh out of West Virginia for the first time in my life, I was a twenty-two year old library school student at the School of Library Service, Columbia University, in the winter of 1945-46....

School of Library Service 1947

Warm Weather in Manhattan In Canada, where I’m from, September marks the end of summer, with days getting shorter and temperatures dropping. In November, snow starts, and it gets really dark outside. Then, in December, it gets very cold, and...

Graduate School of Business 1981

What New York Had That Warmed Me Most I live in Ohio’s snowbelt, now. In my memory, New York, with streets on which the snow seemed to melt like magic, was warmth itself. All fall, I loved taking the bus,...

School of General Studies 2002

Winter in New York What I remember most about my first Columbia winter was how it stopped me in my tracks. Spring break 1993 became “stay-in-the-dorm, give up on travel, and sleep” time. But it fulfilled all those magical idealized...

Columbia College 1996, Graduate School of Journalism 2001

Winter in NYC My home city, Louisville, while being in the state of Kentucky, is not a part of the “sunny south.” However, I was somewhat concerned about spending the winter of 1980-81 in New York City. I had visions...

Graduate School of Journalism 1981