Marathoning and the Yearlong Thesis

Posted on May 11, 2026 by Ishaan Barrett

East side of Low Library during snowy weather from February 13, 2024. Photo courtesy of Ishaan Barrett.

As a senior in the urban studies program, the yearlong thesis is a requirement for graduation and, at least in the four months since I began my work, a deeply formative experience. But from what I can tell, the experience of writing a senior thesis looks different for everyone. Some folks spend only a semester working on a project with a faculty member or research supervisor. Others, namely some of my friends in the engineering school, work on a capstone project on everything from rockets to robotic prosthetics. The senior thesis process looks different for everyone and depending on the department, can involve intense work over the course of just a few months, or focused attention over an entire academic year. Regardless, whether you’re working on a yearlong thesis or other research project, the stamina required to successfully steer the work to its completion feels like a marathon. And even though I’m a little over halfway through the process, with an April deadline on the horizon, I thought sharing more about the process and an honest outlook on my past progress would be worthwhile. More specifically, I want to be transparent about the type of procrastination and delays that happen when you begin working on a senior thesis, and perhaps the panic that might ensue that, eventually, despite perhaps best intentions, pushes you over the finish line. 

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In Plain Sight: Finding the Core Where You Least Expect It

Posted on May 4, 2026 by jbk2191

The hills of Mycenae, hills of Agammemnon (photo courtesy of the author)

The Core Curriculum has a simple job: condensing thousands of years of human thought and culture into 8 semesters of coursework (or really 6, if you don’t count University Writing and Frontiers of Science). One of the many things that makes the Core—and Columbia—unique is the dense intellectual web it cultivates: historical figures from one course will reappear in another, and debates that took on a particular character in Literature Humanities will recur in Contemporary Civilization, but in a modified form that incorporates new perspectives and methodologies. By the end of your four years in the College (and to a lesser extent, SEAS), you will have assimilated a huge range of texts and ideas. They might sometimes feel like a bit of a jumble, but over time, the intense intellectual experiences fostered by the Core will settle into something endlessly rewarding: a base of references that will help you navigate more and more of the academic universe. What initially looks like a closed, self-referential system will soon reveal itself as the entry point into an untold number of books, films, albums, and live performances.

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Horatio and the Core

Posted on April 27, 2026 by sc5184

“Hamlet and Horatio,” engraved by Andrew Leloir for Le Magasin Pittoresque, December 1837

Near the beginning of Hamlet, the titular character famously says to his stolid and rational best friend, “There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It is easy to imagine the two of them—the impossibly imaginative Hamlet, bursting with feeling, described by one Shakespeare critic as having “infinite reverberations,” and the kindly, grounded Horatio, who believes that his stoic perspective can satisfactorily explain the world around him. At the risk of overstating my case, it seems like what the Core has the potential to provide are those things that Horatio’s straightforward philosophy cannot dream of.

A Horatian life, I think, is founded on a few principles and focuses mainly on the present. Most of us are living this kind of life most of the time: we work, we read the news, we talk with other people about other people, we exercise, we try to make sense of the different elements of our lives. We come to college living this way, and most of us leave it to continue to live this way. But what the Core can offer us at its best is a bright glimpse of something so different from all of this that it can be overwhelming. 

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They Didn’t Understand Rage: Columbia 1968 and Community Roundtables

Posted on April 20, 2026 by jjs2310

1968 protestors at the site of the Morningside Park gym construction (Credit: Columbia University Libraries)

“They were just so far from an understanding of rage. They didn’t understand the feeling,” says David Schiller, a Fayerweather Hall occupier during the 1968 protest at Columbia. Schiller captured what lay at the core of the divide between the student protestors and the faculty and administration: the feelings that fundamentally underlaid their political ideology. In my final paper for Frank Guridy’s history seminar, Columbia 1968, I wrote about the Ad Hoc Faculty Group, the faculty coalition serving as mediators between the protesting student organizations and the administration. Where the administration suggested harsh and punitive measures, like mass suspensions and early calling of the police, the Ad Hoc Faculty Group suggested rational discourse with the protestors and agreeing to some of their demands, like halting the construction of the controversial Morningside Park gym and forcing the Institute for Defense Analysis’s research off Columbia’s campus and dime. 

Despite the Ad Hoc Faculty Group’s twenty-four/seven meeting schedule and several rounds of deals presented to the protestors and the administration, they did not end up getting much done. While the park’s construction was halted and not every student involved was arrested and suspended, the Columbia administration still called in the police and suspended many students. Fundamentally, the students and faculty disagreed on whether institutional change was ultimately for the better, and the emotions behind their beliefs separated their motivations, tactics, and ideals regarding the entire Columbia 1968 crisis. The professors took it as a space for learning, where discourse could be exchanged, and their role as faculty could be tested. It was not life-or-death and rage, like it was for the protesting students. 

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Oh the Movies You’ll See: Columbia’s Video Streaming Resources

Posted on April 13, 2026 by jbk2191

Hercules at Versailles (photo courtesy of the author)

When visited in person or even online, the Columbia libraries are huge, dense, and endlessly intimidating. Interesting books populate every shelf of Butler and CLIO search, and while you’d love to read them all—and incorporate them into your latest research project—you don’t need to kid yourself. Navigating the libraries successfully is not about ingesting as much information as possible, but quickly discerning what is useful and discarding all the rest.

That said, books and articles aren’t the only media that can contribute in relevant ways to your summer project, in-class literature review, or senior thesis. Videos can too—either in the familiar formats of the television episode or feature film, or in shorter fragmentary recordings or news segments. These can also be found in large repositories and databases that are available at no extra cost to Columbia students, but are often left unnoticed by those with only a cursory understanding of the libraries’ online resources. To give you a head start on incorporating that new medical documentary or investigative television report into your research project, here are a few of the best video streaming services and databases that Columbia has to offer:

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Research and Industry: The Professional Practice of Inquiry

Posted on April 6, 2026 by Ishaan Barrett

Caption: Image of Chicago office buildings, photo courtesy of Max Bender via Unsplash

For over half my undergraduate career, I helped lead a social impact consulting club on campus. Most of our work was relegated to public interest work and focused on empowering nonprofit groups to tackle fundraising, engagement, and strategic challenges in their programming. In my first year on the board as a second year, I helped work with new consultants to develop consulting hard skills like research and analysis, but also soft skills like public speaking and client relationships. In my second year as one of two Co-Presidents, I spent most of my time overseeing club operations and helping source clients throughout the year, which included—for the first time—a startup. Aside from working on the daily operations of the club, my favorite part of the work by far was mentoring new students—mostly freshman and sophomore associates—about recruitment and academic life at Columbia. One of the questions that I was asked most frequently was about my research experiences and how I translated that work into the professional practice of consulting. 

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Research in a Medieval Cathedral

Posted on March 30, 2026 by sc5184

High altar of the Lincoln Cathedral (photo courtesy of the author)

Last summer, I spent four weeks in London through the Richmond Williams Travelling fellowship, a grant that the English department offers to rising seniors to do thesis research abroad. Arriving in London in July, I knew I wanted to research the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of late-nineteenth-century British poets and painters who had been inspired by medieval art. I spent the first several weeks in different places in London—mainly the British Library, which had all the manuscripts, archives and books that I needed, but also several museums that held the Pre-Raphaelites’ work.

By the time my last few days in London rolled around, I had narrowed my topic down to the poetry of a particular Pre-Raphaelite and had read a fair amount of relevant material. But before I left the country, I wanted to get out of the city and see another part of the UK, hopefully someplace that would benefit my research in a new way. I eventually settled on the Lincoln Cathedral, a landmark of English Gothic architecture that was a couple hours on the train from London. The cathedral, parts of which date to 1072, seemed like it should be on any tourist’s bucket list, but it was also a building that the Pre-Raphaelites had especially admired for its medieval grandeur. John Ruskin, probably the most famous English art critic and one of the three writers whom I had spent the last several weeks exploring, wrote to his father after seeing it that it is “worth all the English cathedrals I have ever seen put together.”

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Wonder and the Core

Posted on March 23, 2026 by cw2770

Snow falling in front of the Met (photo credit: Billy Hughes)

Recently I went to the Met with a friend. Having both taken Art Hum, we decided to play a game in the Medieval wing: we would prohibit ourselves from reading the explanatory signs, and instead try to deduce the very basic information (subject, time period, place of creation) about each object we saw. We were wrong almost 100% of the time, but our game was a lot of fun. Since we had taken Quechua together and co-developed an interest in Inka art, we tried this again in the Met’s new ancient American wing, where we were, again, incorrect but happy. 

Later, I was struck that the foundational clues of this game– Marian blue, use of perspective, the folds in sculptural fabric, etc.– would have gone unnoticed by me even just two years earlier. It was only because we had taken Art Hum that my friend and I could engage with the Met’s collections this way. My coursework had enhanced my leisure time. More generally, I saw how my education was playing offense against boredom and apathy; the more I learned, the more interesting the world became to me. 

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Getting Down to Business on School Break

Posted on March 16, 2026 by jjs2310

The trees I can view from my bed at home, taken while I was attempting to work on job applications. (Credit: Julia Sherman)

It’s 5:27 PM. Maybe your last class has just ended, or you’ve just turned in your last final. Your flight, train, bus, or subway is fast approaching, and you can’t wait to get back home so the rest and relaxation can finally begin. After throwing whatever you need in your trusty carry-on and sprinting to Broadway and 116th, break has finally begun. Put your headphones on, turn up your music, and you’re almost home.

For many Columbia students, we’d love for this to be the end of the anxiety. To get our five-day or five-week break from the hustle and bustle of college life in New York City and settle down at home (or wherever you spend your breaks). However, often, there’s a voice at the back of your head claiming there’s more to be done. Classes to prepare for, personal projects to work on, jobs or internships demanding applications. I’m not advocating for listening to that voice, and I often practice a zero-work break, but there are a few things to do that will quell the anxiety to have the best (and most productive, in whatever sense you want) break possible.

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Toodling in Tubingen (on Hegel’s removal from the Core and its relation to his ideas)

Posted on March 9, 2026 by jbk2191

Hegel graffiti in Tubingen (photo courtesy of the author)

It was a balmy August day in Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, a sleepy (but immensely wealthy) Western European metropolis with the skyline of a much smaller city and one of the more incoherent transport networks I had encountered in Germany (which, given the state of Deutsche Bahn, was saying a lot). The town is known as the nerve center of the German automobile industry—hosting the headquarters of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, as well as their respective car museums. It is also the easiest way to get to Tubingen, an even sleepier Medieval college town nestled in between the Neckar and Ammer rivers, about an hour south of Stuttgart by bus.

That day, there was a regional train outage (Deutsche Bahn again!)—so bus it was. By the time I reached Tubingen, it was getting dark, but the charming Neckar riverfront, and the endearing and distinctive Hölderlinturm (home to its namesake, the German romantic poet Hölderlin, for the last 37 years of his life) were still teeming with tourists. After leaving my travel backpack in the local youth hostel, I made my way back to the center of town. Not for Hölderlin, but for his classmate, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. 

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