Here is the letter I almost wrote, in brief:

“This summer I visited another college, and its campus wasn’t nearly as graceful as ours, which is pleasingly rational and rectilinear and was designed by McKim, Meade & White.”

So I won’t go there, despite this being the Orientation issue and probably the best time of year for mawkishness. Instead I will be “negative,” and offer the Class of 2017 one piece of advice.

By the end of last spring, some vital stuff in me had been replaced by bile. Accordingly, I fled Columbia’s toxic miasma of triple-irony, feigned academicism, and narcissistic self-effacement, of which I had regrettably become a particle. I spent the summer working in what the weatherman unfailingly called the “heart of Arkansas.”

A month into my sequestration in a dry county surrounded by dry counties, some Columbia friends stopped by on a road trip. Drinking late into Tuesday morning, we zealously and capriciously debated our ideals, each contending that only he had a claim to the word “ideal” at all (except for one dirty pragmatist). It’d been a while since I’d had one of those, and I overdid it.

The next morning, as my indolent friends snored in my living room, I swallowed two Advils and two electrolyte tablets and went to what would be a long morning.

That afternoon, after my head cleared up, I realized that I was more exhausted from our spirited debate than our drinking.

Last spring, too much of that sort of strain had worked up mental calluses to the point that I never let my defenses down. I know I am not the only one who, having carelessly introduced an idea into a conversation, has felt strangely and not-quite-consciously compelled to defend it to the death of the conversation. After all, retraction or modification would amount to surrender.

2017, that pressure is stimulating. It is what makes Columbia so worthwhile, and too little of it will render your undergraduate years spiritless and cold. But too much can make you no fun at all.

— Conor Skelding