As I’m a freshman at Columbia, it’s become my duty to lend a perspective to Spectrum that is at once naïve and cynical—think Horatio Alger on six cups of coffee a day. Having spent the last two years in a sad and desolate corner of Wales, it’s high time that I adjust to city life and move beyond the drizzle and the sheep. The pubs won’t be the same and neither will at least one meaning of the word “rubber,” but there’s the slightest chance that some of what I learned there just might translate.

Having minutely sized up my surroundings during NSOP out of sheer paranoia, I feel confident in stating that every member of the Class of 2015 has something unique to offer, and I eagerly welcome my peers and the myriad of perspectives that they bring to Morningside Heights. These will be an interesting four years for all of us, and I hope that our varying ideas and opinions—and our jackass, toolbag criticisms of those ideas and opinions, deserved and undeserved alike (but constant nonetheless)—will make the time we spend together all the more interesting. At the very least it’ll be entertaining.

William Holt is a freshman.