Author Archives: Sara Bell

Choosing a Thesis Topic

After a couple months of light and mounting panic, I settled on a thesis topic. I’m now thrilled I chose this topic—it’s been particularly fun and interesting to write about—but I really struggled to get to it. There’s a few … Continue reading

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Footnotes Are Friends, Not Fluff

“Read the footnotes,” many a humanities professor has intoned to me—I will admit, in vain. When you’re crunched for time and facing a steep amount of reading per day, as many Columbia students are, the footnotes or endnotes seem worth … Continue reading

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My Senior Year in Lit Hum or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Timeline

I am currently enrolled in a possibly-unprecedented combination of classes: the English Major Senior Essay, which is the department’s name for a senior thesis, and the second semester of Literature Humanities, a class typically taken by first-years. “How?” would be … Continue reading

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An Interview About Undergraduate Math Research

For this blog post, I interviewed Cat R., one of my friends from high school, who is currently studying pure math and has been involved in a long-term research project for the past 6 months.  Sara: Introduce yourself! What type … Continue reading

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Changing Tracks: Why Transfer Internally? 

The joke goes like this: by the time I graduate, I’ll have gone to all four undergraduate schools. Now that I’ve gone through the first three, having originally enrolled in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), transferred to … Continue reading

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An Interview with Professor Emmanuelle Saada, Chair of CC

Professor Emmanuelle Saada is the Chair of Contemporary Civilization and Professor of French and of History at Columbia. She spoke with me in October about adapting to teaching the Core online, the direction in which Contemporary Civilization is headed, and … Continue reading

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Notes, Notes, and More Notes

Isabel recently posted an excellent blog post about flowcharts: what they are, and why you should be using them. (I’m definitely trying that method out on my next long paper—thanks Isabel!) I’ve been thinking these days about something related, which … Continue reading

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Reading for Research

One of the most daunting parts of research papers—and, admittedly, of college humanities courses at large—has been secondary reading. I had read journal articles for some classes in high school, but mostly for science classes: academic papers in the humanities … Continue reading

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Pacing Your Papers

If the start to your November has been anything like mine, every item on your to-do list has had something to do with the word “essay”: whether a five-page paper for my intro-level lecture class, a ten-page paper for my … Continue reading

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On The “STEM/Humanities Divide” And Getting Messy

I spent the longest summer of my adolescence in the company of more fish than people. There were mosquitofish, bass, alewife, three-spined stickleback, guppy, herring; fish that had been preserved since 2013 and fish that were euthanized early that morning; … Continue reading

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