The student who traded a college town for a whole city

Annika Wilewicz did everything a first year at a New England liberal arts college is supposed to do, and on the first night knew it was wrong. Weekend after weekend she took Metro-North into New York for the parks, strangers in cafés and jazz at three in the afternoon. Within two months she had applied to transfer to NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. The day she got in, she cried.

Her comparison is a good one. At Wesleyan, the 0.6-mile walk to the grocery store felt like an odyssey. In Manhattan, a similar distance is a coffee walk through Washington Square Park. She joined the student newspaper’s newsroom, in the Third North basement, and found a part-time job’s worth of purpose there.

Her advice to new students is practical rather than grand: sit in a café across town alone for a couple of hours, wander the Met until you are lost, and study somewhere other than Bobst Library. Friends down the hall may last for life, she writes, but so might the person next to you at the theatre.

The headline on her column is the one we borrowed for this issue: the city is the campus.