Making the most of NYC

Midnight view of Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge

A huge draw for me when I was considering Barnard was its amazing location – who wouldn’t want to live in one of the most exciting cities in the world for four years?!  However, for me (and for a lot of the prospective students I speak to) this is also a point of concern.  Many students worry that the pull of New York City would be hard to resist.  And when the sun is shining and your friends are going to hang out in Riverside Park and you know you really should start on your Women in Culture paper, sometimes it can be hard to drag yourself to the library.  However, most semesters I found myself wishing I had taken advantage of the city more than I did.  Campus life itself is so fun it’s often easy to forget the wider world outside Barnard’s gates.  Luckily, you all can learn from my experience and go exploring more often than I did!

Here were some of my favorite things to do in the city while I was a student:

View of the Financial District  from the Staten Island Ferry

Field Trips: Classes at Barnard utilize the city as an extended classroom.  As an art history major, I visited museums and galleries in nearly all of my classes.  Friends in Environmental Science collected and tested water samples from the Hudson; my first-year seminar went to the opera.  There’s no limit to the things you can learn from New York City, and Barnard professors make full use of it.

Urban New York: Each semester, students can participate in Urban New York drawings to win free tickets to various New York City events.  Concert tickets, sports tickets, theater tickets… you name it.  I got a ticket to something each time I participated.  You can also buy discounted tickets to many city-wide events through the Columbia University Arts Initiative.  I tried to see a show at least once a semester, and rarely paid more than $30 for my ticket.

Eat: Most of my babysitting cash went directly to various restaurants around New York City.  After a long day, I would occasionally treat myself to delivery Indian or Thai food (you can get basically any type of food you want delivered directly to the Barnard dorms).  Weekend nights often revolved around an adventure to try a new type of food – dumplings in Chinatown, Korean BBQ, Indian frankies at Roti Roll on Amsterdam Ave.  Absolute Bagels (at 108 and Broadway) was a Saturday-morning must. 

Treats from Smorgasburg in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Boating in Central Park

Parking: Spring in New York is my favorite time of year (although winter with the lights on College Walk is a very close second).  People emerge from their apartments like they’ve never seen sun before in their lives and the parks are crawling.  Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park was one of my favorite weekend outings, and during the week I would often run in either Riverside Park or Central Park.  In a time crunch or on a weekday afternoon, Lehman Lawn at Barnard is a perfect spot to read (or in my case, read for 5 minutes and inevitably fall asleep for an hour).  A picnic blanket was my first purchase once I got to college, and it got a lot of use over my four years.

No matter where you go to college there will always be things you would rather do than your calculus homework.  But if you’ve gotten this far, you know how to prioritize, and why in the world wouldn’t you want to be at a school with the world’s greatest distractions?!

Melanie :)