By Chloe Baker, Senior Opinions Editor
At around 10:00 PM one night in January, I got hungry and decided to take out a bagel from my cupboard. Now, this wasn’t just any bagel, it was a Montreal bagel I had brought back from Canada after visiting my grandmother. This context is important because if you’ve ever had a Montreal bagel, you know how dense it is. I took out the sharpest knife in my kitchen and began to cut open the bagel. Minutes later, I had successfully sliced both the bagel and my finger. Blood gushed all over my white marble kitchen and bathroom, and onto the bagel. Needless to say, the bagel didn’t get eaten in the end.
As soon as I noticed my bleeding finger, I walked out to the 35th Street dorm security post, which is right outside my door. Within minutes my finger was being cleaned with alcohol wipes and pressed down with sugar I brought out from my dorm that I was told would stop the bleeding. I, still frazzled and shaken up by this mess, calmed down by talking to and (eventually) laughing with the security guards who helped me. That night it occurred to me that I hadn’t even hesitated before walking to their desk. In three years, going to them had simply become an instinct.
When you walk into any building at Yeshiva University, you’ll notice one or multiple security guards. Among their many tasks, they rotate through eight-hour shifts, administer guest passes, unlock doors and patrol every floor every hour. On paper, their job is to keep the buildings running and the students safe. And they do that. But if you’ve spent any real time in these buildings – if you’ve ever stopped and said good morning and meant it — you know that what they give goes far beyond what any job description could capture.
Over the last three years, the security guards of the Beren Campus have seen me in every state a person can be in. It left me with a realization that the people who are most often looked past are the ones who have seen me the most clearly.
Not everyone relates to the security guards in the same way. While some students barely make eye contact or say hello to them, others continuously offer thanks and mouth a simple “good morning.” Then there are the few like me, who chat at any chance we can get, and maybe even overstay our welcome at “the post” (only a true overstayer would know that there is a name for where they sit). In the beginning, the security guards were what I suppose most people would call “side characters.” Present, consistent, but existing somewhere on the periphery of my college experience.
My rapport with the security guards is not something that was built overnight, and not anything that came to be in one big moment. As I reflect on the past three years, I realize that the value of a good morning, a thank you, and a 30-second conversation is immense, and it is because of small, continuous interactions like these that the security guards have become a lot more to me than just the people sitting behind the desk. These interactions, compounded over multiple semesters and seasons, add up to something that looks a lot like being known.
And being known, it turns out, looks like a lot of different things.
It looks like a ginger ale appearing in your hand when you have food poisoning, before you even think to ask for one. It looks like “you’ve got this” on the mornings you clearly need to hear it. It looks like someone asking how your class went and actually being interested to hear what you learned about. It looks like showing off your outfit on the way to a wedding and feeling seen in a purely joyful, uncomplicated way.
And sometimes, it looks like someone noticing what you didn’t do.
There was one morning last year when I walked into the school building and rushed past the security desk without saying a word. Nothing was particularly wrong; I was just in my head and in a rush. The guard working stopped me and asked if I was okay. “Yeah, why?” I responded. “You always walk in so happy and say hello,” she said. “This morning you didn’t. You looked sad.”
I hadn’t even noticed. She had.
A few weeks ago, I had a job interview over Zoom. In hindsight, it wasn’t as much of a disaster as I thought — I got called back for further rounds — but in the moment, walking out of that study room, I was convinced I had made a complete fool of myself. I came downstairs to leave the building, and the guards, whom I had been talking to before the interview, asked me how it went. “Not so good,” I said. I was clearly upset, saying I was scared I’d never find a job, that I kept messing up in my interviews. “Don’t say that,” one of them replied. “It’s not true.”
Six words. No lengthy spiel. No fake reassurance. Just a firm refusal to let me speak about myself that way.
In fact, some of the most grounding advice anyone has given me in three years came from behind security’s desk.
One afternoon I went to pick up a package in Brookdale. The guard working that day asked how I was, and I launched into it. I began talking about how I didn’t go to class earlier that day. How I was unmotivated, how I genuinely could not bring myself to care about anything school-related. I blamed it on senioritis, as if naming it would explain my actions and state of mind. She listened to all of it. She kept encouraging me to just go to class. I kept pushing back, giving a million excuses as to why I shouldn’t. Finally, she looked at me and said, “I wish I could tell you something to help, but it has to come from you.” I’ve thought about this a lot since. It is such a simple thing to say, yet no one had really said it to me before. She didn’t solve my senioritis. But she reminded me of something I already knew deep down and had been avoiding — that every morning you wake up you make a choice about what kind of day you want to have, and how you show up in the world.
And maybe that’s part of what makes these relationships so meaningful. They are not built on obligation, or proximity in the traditional sense or even shared identity. They are built on choice — on the decision to, day after day, acknowledge another person’s presence. To ask, and to answer. To stop, even when you’re in a rush.
There’s something quietly profound about being seen by people who don’t need anything from you. They are not grading you, evaluating you, competing with you or expecting you to be any particular version of yourself. And yet, they notice, they pay attention and they remember.
In a place like a college campus, where everyone is moving so quickly and constantly thinking about what comes next, it’s easy to overlook the people who make that movement possible. The ones sitting at the front desk. The ones unlocking doors before you even realized they were locked. The ones who, in many ways, know the rhythms of the buildings — and the people in them — better than anyone else.
Some of them have witnessed generations of students come and go. They have seen stress, excitement, heartbreak and celebration — often all on the same day. And yet, despite all of this, they are so often treated as background.
I’m not saying every interaction needs to turn into a full conversation, or that everyone should suddenly become best friends with the people at the security desk. But what I am saying is that there is something worth reconsidering about how we move through shared spaces, and who we allow ourselves to notice.
Because the difference between a building and a community is not just who occupies it, but how people choose to show up for one another within it.
For me, that has meant lingering at the desk a little longer. Asking one more question. Answering honestly when I’m asked how I am. Letting small moments be enough.
It has also meant realizing that the people I once thought of as being part of the background of my college experience were, in many ways, playing a large part in shaping it.
I’ll keep them nameless here, but they know who they are.
And if you think about your college experience, you probably know who quietly shaped yours too.
Photo Credit: Yeshiva University