• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• Go Green: All the Cool Kids Do It
• At CU, You Are Where You Live
• Letter from the Feditor
• Portrait of a Columbia Hipster
• A Sneak Peek at Barnardʼs New Vag
• Facebook News Feed Charts Relationshipʼs Ups, Downs, Wrongs
• The Hierarchy of Columbia
• THE FED’s Primer on Columbia-Speak
• SEXILED! -- The Board Game
• Magna Carta Libertatum
• Point-Counterpoint: My Roommate Keeps Having Sex in Our Room While I’m There
• Dear Freshmen: How Right You Are!
• Your handy-dandy guide to Morningside Heights!
• Handy Dandy ID
• From the Desk of NSOP
• A Public Service Announcement
• The Fed Exclusive: Butler Library Gives Interview for the First Time in 74 Years
• THEY Watch
• The Staff

So, you've arrived at Columbia. Welcome, and prepare for a year of surprises and self-discovery. If you were searching for intellectual camaraderie and a profound sense of self-satisfaction, you've come to the right league of private universities founded in 1902 to promote athletic competition. Good for you.

One caveat, though: It may take a while for you to start feeling like you belong. It could be halfway through the year before you truly begin to understand and appreciate the Columbia experience. But it will happen, make no mistake. Perhaps the lionly spirit will first enter your heart when you watch the annual Christmas ceremony (for the frosh who haven’t heard of it, that’s when PrezBo lights the ceremonial Yule Log with a torch fashioned out of bounced tuition checks and the skins of baby seals). In the background, the University Marching Band serenades onlookers with either the Columbia fight song or an acoustic version of “Backstreet’s Back,” (alright!!!) depending on the year.

If that isn’t enough to make you roar with Columbia pride, perhaps you’ll need to witness the Varsity Show, a student-run production that astounds us every year with its punlarious wit, humor, and urbanity. I feel obligated to warn you in advance that the scriptwriters are fond of poking fun at buildings with amusing names—like the Vagelos Center at Barnard or Columbia’s Mailman School of Not Going Berserk—lest you choke to death during the actual performance from the sheer hilarity of it all. But if even this spectacle fails to Columbiatize you, then you may have to start taking an active role in campus life in order to feel inspired. That’s where Go Green comes in.

Go Green—not to be confused with Go-Gurt, a Dannon yogurt product, or Nikolai Gogol, the least depressing thing to happen to Russia since underage prostitution—is Columbia’s best response to global warming, the diner from Seinfeld, and all the other things we still pretend to care about even though they’ve long since become passé. Throughout the academic year, members of this campus-wide recycling initiative- cum-Seinfeld-enthusiasts’ guild offer fellow students free thermoses and water bottles in exchange for our names and e-mail addresses. They need the addresses so that they can let us know about exciting opportunities to protect the environment. They need the names because they have so few Facebook friends. So very, very few. Dorky as it sounds, this group could be instrumental in satisfying your need to stroll the Columbia campus with a sense of purpose.

“But wait,” you’re saying, “I’ve already got my thermos. What more can Go Green do for me?” What more, indeed. Picture this: It’s a hot day. There’s a guy, or maybe a nerdy- yet- attractive guy-ette, standing at a table outside Low Library with free lemonade and a box of pins that say, “When Clinton Lied, The Ice Caps Stayed Intact and the Polar Bears Did Not Gradually Begin to Lose Their Habitat.” A nearby poster—featuring a sad, starving polar bear begging for quarters—punctuates his point. That guy is you. You finally have a place in the Columbia ecosystem. At last, you belong. And surely nothing could be more quintessentially Columbian than helping the polar bears (at least now that the polar lions are extinct, poor bastards).

So do the right thing: Go Green! Join up. And remember, if you get hungry whilst preaching the jolly green gospel, the diner from Seinfeld is only a few blocks away.