Every time Classroom 309 of Havemeyer Hall at Columbia University features in a movie, I can tell you exactly which seat I was in when I was failing organic chemistry, trying to remember the integer approximation of the knapsack problem or worse, presenting my hastily cobbled-together hackathon results from last night.
Havemeyer Hall is a mainstay of three broad genres of movies: biographical fiction (Malcolm X, Kill Your Darlings), superhero shenanigans (Spidermen 1, 2 and 3) and Charming but Awkward Humanities teacher finds Love (Mona Lisa Smile and The Mirror Has Two Faces).
POV: You’re in 309 Havemeyer and about to run the final shell script that will patch together your hackathon project, made hastily on 16 total hours of work and 2 total hours of sleep.
Now, Columbia being a widely-filmed campus didn't necessarily evoke any form of surprise or interest for me. It was not something I knew about the school going in, and definitely not something that touched my personal experience while at school. Years later, I would find out that I shared a dormitory with Timothée Chalamet, at which point claiming an acquaintance was an easily proven falsehood. But, now that I watch the movies of people acquiring either mutant powers or self-realization in that classroom, I am taken back to my own memory of being in that space. And it is horrifying how closely I can remember.
I think, perhaps, I would have tried to remember every detail about my time at Columbia with less excruciating journal entries had I known how widely decorated and visible it is. It's kind of like if your ex had a very common name, like Joe. You cannot even make a metaphor about getting a cup of coffee without dodging the name. When I took my parents for a campus tour of Columbia in 2021 (during winter break, when the campus would be sparsely occupied), all I could remember is which libraries had the best spots for crying, caffeine and studying, and which classroom was the worst to access. I am prepared to blame my early-onset arthritis on any and every class I have attended on Hamilton 7.
For years, my dreams have featured a variety of nonsensical exams, midterms, assignments that are nigh impossible to understand, let alone finish, and the architectural placement of every single classroom I have occupied features very prominently in them. In my dreams, I have had to solve calculus problems to earn a date with someone I had a crush on. Once, I even had a dream where I was doing a presentation to my Linguistics(?) class wherein I said the words, "We are all trying to solve for the Divinity of Man in the madness of the experiment called God." My mother heard me from a different room in the house, and had to ask me if I was okay. What kind of sober non-caffeinated mind does this? I haven't yet asked Freud or Jung what it means, and I'm too scared to.
I wasn't particularly brilliant in school either; on average I scored anywhere within the top 5 to 25th percentile of my class. Statistics nerds will be able to point out that this variance is wide, but I would also like to point them to the fact that I had undiagnosed anxiety and survived on 7 cups of coffee a day. The things I learned in school felt so important to me that even today I am somehow able to recall that the derivation of Bohr's atomic model begins by equating Nuclear Force to Gravitational Force, and then takes at least 10 steps thereon, but I cannot tell you where on campus I had my first kiss. I cannot tell you where I realized I still had pieces of my self-esteem left. These are not the things I was assigned a grade for, and yet in every movie about a school, it feels like they end with A+ throughout.
Broadly, we converge on the idea of school as a concept of life, although many parents have the time, choice and patience for home-schooling. School is a structured environment where through defined tasks and activities, we learn some skills. Then, based on other aptitudes we are tested for it, and assigned some letters or a number. Sometimes this grade is a statistical placement: where are you on a normal distribution, if your class is curved. Sometimes the grade represents an absolute value. You got 76 out of 100 and if you had gotten 77, you'd be a better human being; and if you had gotten 100, you might have understood the experiment called God.
I also hate a lot of media about high school. When I was 17, I was studying for the IIT-JEE exam, which is an extremely competitive 6-hr-long national exam for placement into India's most elite engineering universities, and which is not graded on a curve. I was also, at the time, prepping for the SAT's and writing copious application letters to schools in the USA, wondering if somehow the process of writing words of self-actualization to an admissions committee would outweigh agony of the mandatory Chemistry paper of the JEE exam. I was also in the process of helping a metallurgy professor publish his research paper (which would go on to become my first published research paper). I learned very early on in my puberty that workaholism was a good suppressant for the raging horny feelings that were otherwise coursing through my teenage body and which, frankly, an all-girls high school environment in India did not give much space to discuss.
So, when I watch Never Have I Ever, or some other characterization of American High School, it infuriates me. Also because Never Have I Ever feels very removed from every Desi immigrant family because her mother does not make her apply to 9 schools, lets her explore her choices and even encourages her choice of boyfriend, which is exceptional among immigrant families, even the second-generation ones. How dare these kids find love (which I didn’t), find their place in the social hierarchy (which I didn’t), find lifelong friends (which I simply couldn’t have as I was immigrating) and still somehow get into prestigious schools (which I did)? Where are their registered extracurriculars?
And yet, I am strongly bound to all-girls school literature and media in ways I also can't untangle. Derry Girls is probably the closest (and most wonderful) approximation of what it's like growing up with a bunch of girls and their various insecurities. The Enid Blyton novels of St. Clare's and Mallory Towers (novels which I devoured as a 9-yr-old) also follow the journey of girls living through boarding school, only they are significantly less horny and turbulent than the Derry Girls are. I cannot love these shows enough and yet I will cringe at Breakfast Club, 10 Things I Hate About You and Pretty in Pink. In short, I hate school movies that are about people finding themselves in school because I know that I feel like I didn't do that well enough when I was in school. And I feel that way because I didn't get assigned a grade for my personality when I graduated.
I'm returning to school this fall, which is an odd contemplation for someone who has been out of school for almost a decade. I spent so many hours trying to get my entire class schedule on a spreadsheet, map which credits apply to which major, squeeze in a class or two with the Computer Science Department at Penn (to refresh a class from my undergrad) and yet complete the minimum necessary credits required. All this was in vain.
Apparently, at Wharton, you play an auction market for the classes you want with certain imaginary tokens and a weightage preference for certain kinds of schedules and classes. Then, using enormous computational power, an AI matches everyone's weighted preferences and creates clearing prices towards which your tokens are applied. This system is supposed to ensure maximum fairness in choosing classes and flexibility in choosing electives. Also, at Wharton, you have grade non-disclosure and yet there are mandatory courses you are required to take. I do not know what it will mean to be motivated for me in an environment where grades or known markers of success or completion aren't assigned. And I fear that maybe without the structure and rigor of known grades, I might find love, I might reintegrate into a new social hierarchy or I might yet find new parts of me that can’t be statistically mapped on a normal distribution.