What 300 Grants Taught Me

Posted on August 10, 2026 by cw2770

Credit: U.S. National Science Foundation

When people hear that I spent my summer doing research through the Laidlaw Scholars Program, they usually ask the same question: “So…what was your project about?” The short answer is bioethics. The longer answer is that I spent the summer analyzing more than 300 National Science Foundation (NSF) awards to understand how recent funding changes have affected bioethics research across the United States. My goal was to identify which projects involved embedded ethics, how administrative terminations were reshaping the field, and what those changes might mean for the future of scientific innovation. But somewhere between hundreds of grant abstracts, spreadsheets, and long meetings with my mentor, I realized my project wasn’t really about grants at all. It was about priorities.

When I first started, I assumed research existed to answer questions. As my project progressed, I realized research also determines which questions are asked in the first place. Every grant I read represented a decision. Someone decided that a project studying responsible artificial intelligence, equitable healthcare, or research ethics was worth investing in. At the same time, other projects disappeared as funding priorities shifted. Looking at hundreds of awards side by side forced me to think about something I had never considered before: funding is never just about money. It reflects what we believe is important enough to study. That realization completely changed the way I think about science.

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“Reclaiming Our Narrative”: An Analysis of Afghan History and Cold War Politics

Posted on August 3, 2026 by cw2770

Coming to Columbia University as a transfer student in the Fall of 2024, I had one goal, which was to advance the research I had begun during my freshman year. Ever since 2021, when the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, I began looking deeper into Afghan history, especially because I grew up hearing stories from my family about their experiences as refugees during the Soviet-Afghan War. This deep dive into Afghan history, Cold War politics, and the broader Central Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern regions made me realize how little of my community’s story was told by the community itself. Upon entering my freshman year, I was unsure how my research journey would unfold, but I knew I was going to try to put my foot forward to make change. In my first year, what I found helpful and something that I suggest to every student researcher is to take research methods classes as well as classes that center around the region or subjects they are interested in doing research about. By doing this, I learned different research methodologies, got involved as a research assistant in the Moving Stories Project led by one of my professors at WashU, and launched the first phase of my own project, which I titled “Reclaiming Our Narrative” through the Living History program offered by the WashU History department.

My first project was a semester-long study of the Afghan American community’s migration patterns, especially to the Midwest and the St. Louis region. I used a mix of methodologies I had learned from my professors and classes, especially oral history and statistical analysis. After that semester at WashU, I presented my findings to members of the History department. What has stayed with me most is how one audience member came to me afterward and thanked me for preserving the truthful narrative of my community. He said that after 9/11, his view of Afghans and Muslims had always been negative and shaped by the media, but he appreciated learning from someone from the community about the community’s reality. That moment made me realize how much I want to continue this research to clarify the narrative told about my community. Thus, I came to Columbia University largely to advance this research and gain more support for this work, given Columbia’s resources, especially the Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (URF) department. 

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Zero to Hero: The Power of Being the Least Experienced Person in the Room

Posted on July 27, 2026 by cw2770

Sitting with members of my Laidlaw cohort outside of Hamilton Hall after a Laidlaw session in June 2026. Credit: Abril Rodriguez Calle

The first time I walked into the 202 Hamilton Conference Room for a research information session, I felt like I had shown up to a party where everyone else had received the dress code and I hadn’t. People were tossing around words like “methodology,” “literature review,” and “qualitative coding” with the ease of people discussing weekend plans. I stood there nodding, wondering if anyone could tell that I had absolutely zero idea what was going on. I wasn’t just inexperienced—I was the least experienced person in the room.

In that moment, I saw all my hopes of getting the Laidlaw scholarship I wanted so badly slip through my fingers. There was simply no way that I could compete with these people who seemed to have résumés full of projects, mentors, and methods I had never heard of. I remember hovering over the “submit” button on my application and thinking, “Who am I kidding?” But I submitted it anyway, partly because I was curious, partly because I was stubborn, and partly because I deluded myself into thinking I could play up my résumé to seem on par with the other applicants.

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The Long Journey of the Senior Thesis

Posted on July 20, 2026 by sc5184

Ecce Ancilla Domini!, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tate Britain

I first started thinking about the senior thesis during the beginning of my junior year, when a friend who was a year older than me told me about the Richmond Williams Travelling Fellowship. This was a fellowship that the English department offered every year that funded research abroad the summer after junior year. This sounded like too good of an opportunity to pass up, so I started thinking about a research project I would be interested in which would benefit from being pursued abroad. 

The trouble was that, as an English major, most research usually involved a bunch of books that could be found in any big university library. I had done research the previous summer at Columbia, and everything that I could have possibly needed was at Butler—they had even ordered frayed first editions of nineteenth-century poems from Harvard for me! Even the correspondence of most major writers had been published by university presses. I realized that unless I wanted to pursue some pretty niche historical research (hunting through marginalia in the manuscripts of some forgotten writer, say), I needed to think of a reason to travel that wasn’t mainly archival. After pondering this for a few weeks, I thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, a nineteenth-century group of painters and poets who had wanted to make medieval-style art. I had learned about them in a class I had taken on Victorian Poetry, and I had been fascinated by their paintings and poems. (It also helped that most of their best paintings were in museums in London.) I was especially interested in how the Pre-Raphaelites had navigated their attempts to move the formal conventions art backwards without seeming derivative or irrelevant. 

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Practicality and Humanism in the Age of AI

Posted on July 13, 2026 by jbk2191

On Friday, February 6th, ABC News aired an interview with Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic—the artificial intelligence developer behind the Claude series of large language models, which rank only behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT in both popularity and performance. The wide-ranging discussion, which addressed Anthropic’s efforts to influence regulatory conversations and align their models with human values, was of particular interest to me: I’m currently writing a senior thesis on the way non-reductive approaches in the philosophy of mind can be used to deflate ascriptions of moral agency and consciousness to AI systems.

But another part of the interview stood out. Amodei, who studied English as an undergraduate, suggested that as a fast-growing company, Anthropic was especially interested in job candidates with the emotional intelligence and soft skills that are characteristic of a background in the academic humanities. Claude already serves as an extremely sophisticated coding assistant, which many consider stronger (and certainly faster) than the average entry-level programmer. But several of the current bottlenecks in AI development—alignment, reinforcement learning, and organized reasoning capacities—are not purely technical in nature. Creative thinking, problem solving, and qualitative judgment will be just as central to the AI revolution as are data centers, compute infrastructure, and memory capacity. 

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Reflections on Beginning New Research

Posted on July 6, 2026 by sb4727

Getting started with page one in the archive, in Seville this summer (photo credit: Sarah Bryden).

It’s been somewhat surprising to me that, in my final year at Columbia, I’ve begun several new research projects. This has entailed a recent flurry of background research, grant applications, and “statement of purpose” drafting. In this, I’ve been reminded that getting started is a labor-intensive process, and arguably the most difficult aspect of doing research. After four years, it’s also become a more-familiar process to me, even if I still have a lot to learn. The goal of this blog post is to pass on some of this familiarity, and offer encouragement to anyone feeling overwhelmed, lost, or tired at the start of a new research project. 

The difficulties of beginning a research project are many: you have to read previous scholarship, find a gap to address, and make a concrete plan for filling that gap. All of this is time consuming, and it can be anxiety-inducing to put yourself in conversation with seasoned scholars and try saying something new. Moreover, you may also be applying for grants, fellowships, or other funding sources in order to make your project possible; needless to say, this adds another level of anxiety. Almost always, getting started with a research project means worriedly wondering whether your research question makes sense, whether your proposed methodology will work, whether any of your funding will pan out, and whether you will actually find anything interesting.

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“To The Lighthouse” and Endings

Posted on June 29, 2026 by sc5184

Image courtesy of Encyclopædia Britannica. Photo: Dave Shafer / © New Hampshire Division of Travel and Tourism Development.

I spent several hours of my last winter break as a Columbia student rereading To The Lighthouse. The only other time I had read it had been three years earlier, in Literature Humanities. I remembered finding it dense and tiring, not just because of the text itself but because of the speed with which we had to read it. I remembered my Belgian professor telling us that we had to visit the Isle of Sky, where the novel is set, and I remembered the Ramsays’ six-year-old son wanting to kill his father. And I remembered that we had been reading it when the weather had become really warm for the first time, and everyone was out on the lawns—my first Columbia spring—and there I was, sitting on a bench in Morningside Park on a sunny morning, trying to follow Virginia Woolf’s serpentine sentences. 

Partly then, rereading the novel as an English major who was nearing graduation was a way of coming full circle. Since that spring I had read many novels and taken many English classes, and I thought that the book would be more accessible to me now. It would be a way of closing the loop of my time at Columbia and seeing how far I had come as a reader. My other reason was that this particular novel had come up many times in those three years, invariably as an example of novelistic greatness, and I felt that my rushed Lit Hum reading had not led to my appreciating the book as it deserved. It was my girlfriend’s favorite book, it was a book that professors often brought up, it was a book that my father decided to read and then praised enthusiastically. A week or so before the break, I was having lunch with a friend who mentioned in passing that To The Lighthouse was, for him, “everything that a novel could be.” I decided then that I had to read it again. 

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On Doing it Over Again

Posted on June 22, 2026 by Ishaan Barrett

Image of the author (far right) and friends at Tree Lighting, Fall 2024 (photo courtesy of the author)

Nearing the end of my college experience, it is easy to identify the things that I have enjoyed most while here at Columbia. Harder, though, is articulating the different paths I would have taken, topics I would have explored, and academic journey I would have traversed if given a second change to do it all over again. Of course, there are several things that I would have changed, and even more things that I would endeavor to repeat because I have such fond memories and experiences doing them. But looking back on my time at Columbia, and staring down the small handful of months that I have remaining, I think I have a few important insights to offer when it comes to deciding how you should—and more importantly want—spend your time here at Columbia. 

When I first began as a first year at Columbia, I was determined to pursue a career in medicine. I was already enrolled in a multivariable calculus class and general chemistry lecture course before I arrived on campus back in September of 2022. In the first few days of classes, my advisor let me know that an accelerated general chemistry course was open to new students who did well on AP Chemistry. I attended the first class and was eager to continue but realized—quite quickly—that it conflicted with my first semester section of Literature Humanities. To the misfortune of my interest in accelerated general chemistry, my Literature Humanities teacher was Professor Nicholas Dames; the first seminar of our class completely captivated my attention, and I decided to let my accelerated chemistry class fall to the wayside. That year, I committed to staying in my same section of Lit Hum the entire year and completely scrapped my plans to do intensive chemistry courses, choosing the regularly paced general chemistry lectures instead. That curiosity and deep love of the humanities is my first year of college is something I remember fondly and would not replace; in fact, that choice helped me find, quite quickly, the intellectual discipline that would become my passion: public policy. 

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We Are All Foucauldians Now

Posted on June 15, 2026 by jbk2191

La Trahison des images, René Magritte

Of all the writers on the Contemporary Civilization syllabus, few are as misunderstood and routinely misappropriated as Michel Foucault. That should come as a surprise, given that Foucault is one of the most frequently cited academic authors of all time, his work offering an unavoidable—and to many, irresistible—dose of skepticism to most surveys of 20th-century European philosophy, social theory, intellectual history, cultural studies, and anthropology. Many on the left, especially, have seen in Foucault’s work a profound and debilitating critique of the Enlightenment and the liberal pretensions of progress to which it gave rise, including the supposedly ‘humane’ treatment of the incarcerated and mentally and physically ill, as well as the increasingly-rigid routinization of sexuality, education, and other forms of social reproduction. Yes, Foucault’s account of a pluralistic modernity governed (but underdetermined, in the last instance) by numerous mutually-reinforcing but decentralized power structures lacks the clarity or generality of a Marx or Weber. But in a messy and contorted world where the traditional dichotomies of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ or of ‘rational-legal’ and ‘charismatic’ authority no longer seem descriptively sufficient, an acknowledgment of the irreducible complexity of social relations may be called for. Foucault’s enduring popularity suggests that many agree.

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Witnessing a Microcosm of Knowledge Production

Posted on June 8, 2026 by sb4727

Our Fall 2025 Field Methods class! (Photo credit: Professor Meredith Landman)

One of the larger Columbia-induced changes to my thinking has been an interest in the process of knowledge production. This has been stimulated by my experiences in the Core, which helps us to wonder, for instance, how our understanding of matter got from Aristotle’s four elements to the Higgs boson. This interest has also been stimulated by my senior thesis process, which has involved reading, taxonomizing, and engaging with several swaths of scholarship. I have been surprised at how rapidly scholarship can develop within a decade, let alone a century. Essentially, I have realized that no piece of knowledge should be taken for granted, and that all ideas have an origin point. In realizing this, I’ve also begun to wonder where widely-held ideas come from, how some ideas dominate, and how different groups of thinkers interact with each other. 

Aside from senior thesis and the Core, my best window into this problem has come from a linguistics class called Language Documentation and Field Methods. This is an amazing class, and easily the culmination of my years as a linguistics major: over a semester, we worked with a native speaker of an under-documented language to learn, study, and describe the language in linguistic terms. I loved this class so much that I took it twice, both times working with a native speaker of Kalmyk (a Mongolic language spoken in Russia, China, Mongolia, and the USA’s east coast). The goal of this course is to teach the methodology of language documentation, which is a vital task of linguists given that most of the world’s languages are currently endangered. 

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