My First Year Quad Experience

When I first arrived at Barnard, residential living was one of my main anxieties - would I like my roommate? Would she like me? I had opted into Barnard’s random selection process rather than choosing a roommate via Facebook and I hoped that the system would find me someone who was compatible.

I’ll admit that both my parents and I were surprised as we made our way up to my room in Sulzberger - it was way larger than I ever expected a dorm in New York City to be! A large window at the east end of the dorm opened onto Broadway and gave us a panoramic view of Columbia’s campus across the street. I spent many hours absentmindedly watching the taxicabs roll by and the lines of students waiting for lunch at the food trucks.

My first year quad experience unfolded in bits and pieces, but I soon realized that the random selection process was one of the best parts of my first year - my roommate and I became close friends through our late night dance parties, dinner excursions, and homework woes. Through our adventures of shoe-swapping, pumpkin hunting, and one memorable inflatable Spongebob taped to our window, we made our dorm a welcoming place to come back to every evening - both for ourselves and all of our friends.

Not surprisingly, I found many of my friends only steps away in the adjacent dorms or just an elevator ride down. The entire quad (which houses the whole first-year class) is connected, meaning that at any hour of the night, you can knock on a friend’s door without ever leaving the building. The 8th floor lounge was our spot, and I have many fond memories of movie nights, study sessions, and of course, cooking disasters. At any given moment, I could walk into the lounge and find at least one or two of my friends in there working hard (or perhaps hardly working) on homework. Our friend group would often chat and study into the wee hours of the morning, pausing, of course, for a late-night smoothie break at Diana. 

In an odd sort of meet-cute, I met one of my best friends in the bathroom my second week in. We stood at the sinks and bonded over our love for 80’s music and the idiosyncrasies of American slang. After running into each other almost every night after that, I introduced her to her first smoothie and the rest is history.

At the end of my first year (or at least, at the end of our time together on campus), I looked back through my photos and videos and found that we had all made so many memories over the past six months. Despite my reservations at the beginning of the year, I knew that the Quad experience set me up for a bright next four years with all of my friends at Barnard.