Losing items such as cellphones, laptops or even IDs can be a stressful situation and, for many Columbia students, one without a real solution.

"If a wallet or phone is lost I haven't seen many options of recovering it."

"Yeah I guess I'd go to public safety or maybe print out some flyers and put them around."

"If you lose something at Columbia it's probably gone."

Located on the first floor of Low Library, Public Safety's Lost and Found headquarters is open 24 hours a day and besides helping students locate their lost possessions, offers services to prevent the loss or theft of valuables.

"It's a great lost and found program and we engrave the computers here and we mark the cellphones inside the battery. We mark it with a special police ink," explains Ricardo Morales, Manager of Crime Prevention Programs.

"My past experience a lot of students lose IDs and things like that so once you lose them they send you an e-mail and you can go pick it up so I felt it was pretty effective."

Despite the services offered, the presence of theft on campus still has many students doubting the likelihood of being able to retrieve lost or stolen items.

"I just think it's really hard to find. Like if you lost one laptop it would be really hard to find the person who took it. So I think it's kind of not worth it."

"I think particularly laptops and MP3 players would not be easy to recover because they would just not be recover-able."

But Public Safety officials see a different side of students and they continue to provide services for students to be able to locate their items.

"We have good people here. People with good hearts. They find wallets full of cash, turn it in to public safety so now when the owner comes in and they're surprised they say, 'Oh my god somebody did turn it in that's great!'"