By KATIE MEYER

ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR

New York City is home to dozens of colleges and universities and thousands of students, but often, these students do not know much about what is going on at campuses outside of their own.

This problem, however, which hinders a lot of potential opportunities for networking and sharing information, may soon be solved, and it looks like Fordham University will be a part of that solution.

Arvin Ahmadi, a junior at Columbia University, recently came up with the idea to form a group made up of representatives from major colleges in New York City to promote communication and a sense of unity among the different schools.

A few weeks ago, Ahmadi contacted a few members of Fordham United Student Government (USG) via email and introduced the idea. Soon after, he met with USG members Sama Habib, GSB ’14, and Jenny Lim, FCRH ’14 in Campbell Hall.

“[Ahmadi wanted to] try and connect all of the student leaders from the New York City schools and either provide a network for them or make it a social thing,” Habib said. “He wasn’t sure where it was going, but he wanted to get some student leaders from big name schools like Fordham, NYU, Columbia and FIT.”

The Fordham students were wholeheartedly on board with the idea.

“I think that Students For New York has amazing potential to bring together students from all different city schools,” Lim said.

Habib agreed. “We thought it was really cool,” she said. “FIT? I don’t know anyone from FIT.”

They agreed to meet again and on March 27 they met up to continue planning the group with student representatives from Columbia, the New School, Cooper Union, NYU, Hunter College and FIT. It is anticipated that St. John’s will also be a part of the group, though they did not send representatives to the first meeting.

The group is sponsored by AOL and The Huffington Post, so the students were able to use AOL as a meeting place. They will be working with two Huffington Post employees, who will serve as liaisons and offer support from The Huffington Post.

Fordham had a strong presence at the meeting. In addition to Habib and Lim, Meghan Muha, GSB ’14, and Kevin Conroy, GSB ’14, attended. Many of the other schools only brought one or two representatives.

The first meeting served as a general brainstorming session; the group came up with three main pillars for their organization. They dubbed them “The Three C’s”: campus, community and career.

They also came up with an official name at their first meeting: they will be called Students for New York, which Habib is proud to say was her own idea.

For now, Students for New York wants to remain a small organization so that it can work on strengthening its core group before expanding further.

Eventually, though, it is interested in involving other New York schools as well.

“[We hope to] create a broad network in which students have a plethora of resources made available to them through a united student effort,” Lim said.

One of their current objectives, as of the March 27 meeting, is to organize community service events, which the different schools will either carry out separately or as a collaborative effort. There was also talk of starting a last-call job fair to help upperclassmen find jobs, though that idea is still tentative.

As for Students for New York’s presence on campus in the future, much is still unknown about the effort.

“There is a lot to work out logistically,” Habib said.

The group will definitely try to stay connected over the summer and have a bigger presence on campus next year, especially by getting more underclassmen involved.

Eventually, there might even be a booth at the club fair for the Fordham chapter of Students for New York.

For now, the group wants to focus on establishing strong connections and uniting the schools that are currently a part of the project.

“At the end of the day, we’re all students and we’re all going to have similar interests and we’re all going through the same problems,” Habib said. “[There is a] greater purpose of our generation to connect with other students and other people and to most definitely help each other out.”