Confessions of a Cat-holic (167)

Going to a school like Columbia was a humbling experience for me. Even though I had long been deemed as the head girl of St Francis and the "Angelababy of Columbia" who had allegedly gone through multiple plastic surgeries to look the way I was seen on social media, I had to say that I was never, and not even close to, the smartest, hottest, or sexiest among my peers at Columbia.

When I said that the guys at Columbia were very good looking, especially when compared with geeky Ed from Yale, I would say that the girls in my school were just as gorgeous.

I had seen Kate McKinnon on campus, possibly when she was doing on campus work at the Lerner reception desk. She was one of the very few blonde girls in New York City, you just couldn't miss her. I saw her at the Varsity Show a couple of times and her performance was stunning. Just so you would know, Columbia actually dedicated the entire Varsity Show to mock Yale University, by emphasizing that we were Columbia in the city of New York, while Yale was in the city of New Haven, Connecticut. They even said that the republican community in New York was close to zero, with the president, vice president and community chair falling all on one pathetic person. Very early on, I knew that the two schools were in direct conflicts with each other in terms of the ideologies, religious beliefs and political views.

Yale operated like a funnel and they believed in eugenics and exclusivity. They believed that they were the top of the social pyramid by playing hard to get in. Columbia was different, they would give scholarship to people who displayed "unusual" qualities and let them be the beacon. They even had a scholarship dedicated to displaced students now, accepting asylum seeking candidates from Syria, Lebanon and even China. Sometimes, it could feel like a guerrilla warfare in the midst of Manhattan. But Columbia's student body was evenly talented, with racial diversity held in unity.

Then there was my favorite girl from Columbia, Amanda Li. Amanda was the other class representative of the engineering student council in my year. Total hands down for Amanda being the hottest girl at Columbia. I liked the way she talked. She talked with a Boston accent and she never spoke a word of Chinese. She was a chemical engineering and biomedical engineering major. After her graduation at Columbia, she obtained her PhD at University of California, San Diego in bioengineering with specialization in multi-scale biology. She was then a postdoctoral fellow at ATOM consortium and a decentralized consensus fellow at Insight Data Service, after which she had moved on to Stealth biotech start up as a data scientist.

Amanda went out with Eddie's best friend at Columbia. Columbia had physical education requirements for all students, so I signed up for cardio fitness in the first semester, because other classes were usually taken based on seniority preference. The gym was 3-storey high, I was usually working out with the class on the first and third floor. There occasionally, on the second floor where all the weight training facilities were, I saw Eddie working out with David Wang, Amanda's boyfriend at the time. Okay, I found out something about Eddie. It was that he was a gym class hero. I had to stay fit myself too, I said to myself. So I began a workout schedule at Columbia, partly to be in shape, partly to check out the guys in the weight training session. But too bad, the weight training session was not on the same floor with the cardio machines, so I could only look at him and check him out from afar.

So I googled and stalked David Wang a little bit on the internet. Eddie and David were workout buddies. David was the son of a professor at Columbia, which meant that he was also a legacy student, probably on free ride too. David was an IEOR major at Columbia's engineering school. But in my memory, his grades were not very good, maybe even worse than Eddie's. But none of that mattered to me. David liked to show off his work out photos with his abs in a white tank top.

I thought his friend, David, really looked like those bad ass guys I had seen in Flushing, the Asian version of 50 Cent on his album cover "Get rich or die trying". No, maybe like Crown J or Taeyang from Big Bang? But back then, these Korean stars had not even debuted yet. Why the hell was I stuck with Ed the super geek?