Peer-to-Peer: The Core as Taught by Graduate Students

Posted on October 18, 2021 by Adam Kluge

Old MIT Classroom.
Photo Credit: Ryan Tyler Smith

“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.

―  Plato, The Republic

When the Core Curriculum is introduced to eager first-year students during their initial weeks on Columbia’s campus, or even earlier during a proverbial visit to Morningside Heights during their junior year of high school, it is often assumed that Columbia’s most renowned faculty will be present in the classroom when the first words of The Iliad are introduced. And, in many instances, this is exactly the case. Students pour into classrooms already reverberating with discussion and philosophies, sitting side by  side at desks positioned just slightly too close together. At the front of the room, they might find the Chair of the English department, or a former Nobel laureate. In my own experience, however, my first day of Literature Humanities found me addressed by a graduate student, adorned in a floral blazer and tweed pants.

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A Research Assistant’s Summer

Posted on October 8, 2021 by Christian Flores

Columbia Business School. Photo Credit: Christian Flores

A few weeks ago, I wrapped up my summer research internship at Columbia Business School (CBS).  Their internship program provides students a paid opportunity to work on a summer project with CBS faculty across multiple quantitative social science disciplines: finance, economics, marketing, management, decision sciences, operations, accounting, or data analytics.  I worked on an economics project with Professor Cailin Slattery that analyzed governors’ decisions to invest in state level company incentive deals (e.g. Amazon HQ2 in New York City) versus other economic development programs like education. More specifically, for the bulk of the summer, I compiled a database of small business programs across different states and years. This entailed me manually sifting through state budgetary documents and putting the titles of the programs into a spreadsheet. Then, for the final few weeks, I worked with data from a survey that Professor Slattery commissioned. I compiled some descriptive statistics that I found interesting and produced some graphs that I think could motivate future research.

I hope that my following reflection will not only teach you something about my experience, but also give you insight into what you might want to be thinking about as you work on your own potential projects. Apart from the actual topic I worked on, I think I learned most about what full-time research entails and looks like.

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The Age-Old Question of Crafting A Research Question

Posted on October 1, 2021 by Cecilia Guan

Every project has a beginning, and every idea begins when you think it into existence. Photo Credit: Unsplash

So, it’s the first day of the semester, and your professor is going over the course syllabus with your class. You flip to the assignments section and see, ‘30 PAGE RESEARCH PAPER DUE’ on the last day of the course. Your heart stops. You’ve never written a research paper for this subject, let alone a paper this long. Where do you even start? 

The professor explains that the paper will be the culmination of planning, researching, and writing over the course of the semester. Most likely, professors will provide deadlines throughout the semester (e.g. first draft due, peer review due) that will help you pace your process and keep on track. In my experience, research projects are a challenge like no other, where a successful end result depends on the preparation and considerations done in advance of any kind of final paper content. I believe it is critical that before you start, you need to define a research question that entices and motivates your intellectual curiosities. 

First and foremost, breathe—you are so capable of this project, and you’re not alone in this process.

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An Opera Through Time

Posted on September 23, 2021 by Christian Flores

Columbia Core Books. Photo Credit: Christian Flores

This past summer for Music Hum, our class was assigned to watch Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It is one of Mozart’s most seminal pieces and widely considered among the greatest operas ever composed. Watching this particular performance in 2021 was an eerie experience, however. Of course, I enjoyed the opera’s undeniable charm. From the music to the writing, it is clear why people continue to revisit the comedy centuries later. The performers’ solos, known as arias, wowed me, particularly the female sopranos. And yet, there is heavy baggage that comes along with any piece of art that is hundreds of years old. For example, I learned that Mozart was friends with other composers whose work was largely financed by companies heavily involved in the slave trade. A 21st century audience deals with these complications differently than Mozart’s contemporaries. But as I reflect a bit more on what exactly I watched, I am particularly interested in the fact that centuries before me, someone sat in an opera house and watched the same characters perform more or less the same music. The same dialogue, perhaps the same stage direction, everything that I witnessed has been shared by people of a different time. 

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Humility and Hegel: The Value of a Broad CC Syllabus

Posted on September 16, 2021 by Virginia Ignelzi

An image of Alma Mater, viewed from below. Photo credit: Columbia University Photo Library

As I read through the CC syllabus in my sophomore year, I felt that I was riding along in a high-speed train, going too quickly to take in the scenery. The syllabus was so wide-ranging and fast-paced that I struggled to absorb it all. Adding the chaos of COVID to the already packed semester meant that the later authors were covered in only a class each. When it was time to read Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History, for example, we had a single class to cover it all. That’s one sub-two-hour session to explore the notoriously dense philosophy that continues to shape our discourse surrounding history to this day.

This breakneck pace can seem like a puzzling choice. Why did the creators of the CC syllabus choose to cover so much material in such a short amount of time, prioritizing breadth over depth? I, of course, can’t speak about their thought process with any certainty. However, I can say that I found an enormous amount of value in the wide-ranging nature of the course. In fact, it is precisely the broad knowledge that CC provides which I want to consider in this post, because this is the kind of knowledge that forms an excellent basis for research.  Continue reading →

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Literature as Local: Experiencing the Core through New York City

Posted on September 9, 2021 by Adam Kluge

Yellow Car Running on the Street Between the Building During Daytime. Photo Credit: Robert Bye

“]

]you will remember

]for we in our youth

did these things

yes many and beautiful things

] 

]

]” 

― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

It is a well-known fact that Columbia University exists as an extension of New York City. Student residence halls tower above the smog-engulfed traffic on Amsterdam Avenue; familiar scents of cooking gyro waft over the campus gates from the halal cart on 116th Street; and many Lions opt to take advantage of discounted tickets to museums, athletic events, and Broadway performances. To attend Columbia, even with its sprawling fields and historical architecture, is to live in the proverbial “City That Never Sleeps.” And, in many ways, this adage holds true.

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Where Philosophy Ends and Individual Inquiry Begins

Posted on September 4, 2021 by Cecilia Guan

A picture I took of my dog Mochi, my quarantine and the Good Place binge-watching buddy. Photo credit: Cecilia Guan

One of my favorite shows of all time is The Good Place. If you haven’t watched it yet… What are you waiting for? If you already have, you’ll know how central the exploration of different philosophies is to the show. Eleanor Shellstrop, the main protagonist, finds herself in the Good Place (a heavenly afterlife) after a fatal accident. She soon realizes her placement was a mistake and that she was meant to spend eternity in the Bad Place. As a last ditch effort to assuage her guilt, she recruits the help of Chidi Anagonye, a moral philosophy professor, to help her learn to be good and earn her spot in the Good Place. 

What becomes evident early on in the show is that learning philosophy is quite different from applying it. In other words, to know what it takes to be a good person is not the same as being one.

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Choosing a Thesis Topic

Posted on April 1, 2021 by Sara Bell

The first snow of my Freshman year. Photo Credit: Sara Bell.

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 things I wish I had spent more time thinking about before I was in the thick of the fall semester, trying to handle the academic reflection that a thesis needs at the same time as midterms hit. So if you’re thinking about possibly writing a thesis next year, or the deadline is approaching and you’re in the same boat as I was, I’d recommend trying out a few things. 

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Camaraderie and the Core (on Zoom), Part II

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Teresa Brown

This semester’s Zoom set-up. Photo credit: Teresa Brown.

In September I wrote a blog post on my first impressions of Zoom school. It has now been over a year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I have taken nine classes over Zoom. As my senior year rapidly approaches its final days, I wanted to take some time to reflect on this final year.

Having to complete my final year of undergrad in a virtual format wasn’t something I had ever even considered as a possibility. Being 2,895 miles away from campus, waking up for a 5:40am class because of the time difference, and having to mute/unmute myself to speak in class were all things I suddenly found myself forced to adapt to. Fortunately, I have been able to return to New York City this spring and, while classes are still entirely virtual, being near campus has helped make senior year feel a little more normal.

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Footnotes Are Friends, Not Fluff

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Sara Bell

Google Scholar’s “Cited by” interface.

“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 only a skim, if that. (To maximize my printing budget, I have, on more than one occasion, carefully printed everything except the endnotes.) What I hadn’t really understood every time that advice was given, and what I didn’t grasp until (you guessed it) I set out to write a senior thesis, was that footnotes are actually essential. 

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