It’s 5 a.m. on a Monday night, and we’re sitting on our dorm room floor, exams forgotten, essays abandoned and problem sets cast aside, trying to piece together the rest of our lives. Some of us want to believe we have everything figured out, and some of us are still grappling with where we’re going. No matter where we are in our college careers, it’s hard to believe how fast four years can fly by.

While there are hundreds of advice pamphlets and blog posts about how to navigate a college experience locked away inside the four walls of a grassy college compound, not as much exists for what an NYU student might call a college experience. That’s because we chart our own college experience in the city instead of letting it be defined by the confines of a college campus.

In these pages, we try to unpack the day-to-day struggles of being a student in the city into digestible nuggets. We’re asking the questions that we all face at one point or another wandering around Washington Square Park, from how to fit into the fabric of the city to how to carve your own career path. We’re trying to offer our best tips to the crammers at Bobst Library on how to stay up all night and how to avoid the ill-planned schedule you may have set this semester. We’re trying to bring people together as we ponder how to connect with professors, how to build a student club and where to start a romance in the city.

The ideas in this issue are more than words printed on paper — they’re a call to action for us all to become more in touch with the city and the thousands of people around us. We don’t have all the answers, but just like everyone else, we’re looking for them.

– Kaleel Munroe & Hanqing Chen