Falling into First Drafts

Posted on November 6, 2020 by Isabel Wong

Anne Carson’s Bird by Bird, which houses the chapter, “Shitty First Drafts.”

The other day, part of my thesis was due. As the deadline loomed, I found myself unable to write more than half a page. I crafted opening line after opening line, but no matter how many times I stepped away from my writing to gain a new perspective, I couldn’t move beyond the first couple of paragraphs. 

Since turning those pages in, I have come to realize that what prevented these starts from leading to anything more than frustration and abandonment was my own inability to let drafts be drafts. Each day, after struggling through a paragraph, I would look back at what I had left on the page and cringe in horror. Everything I had written sucked. It was absolutely terrible and completely unsalvageable, and the only option left was to begin again. I cannot go on writing like this, I would think to myself.

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It’s Okay to be Scared of Office Hours! 

Posted on November 3, 2020 by Rhea Sahai

Photo credit: Toa Heftiba, unsplash.

I am not the type of student who goes to office hours every week. I’m eternally jealous of my friends who are able to just go chat with their professors about anything and everything, but maybe I’m too scared, maybe my school didn’t give me a lot of student-teacher interaction. To be frank, I don’t know what the answer is but no matter how much I tell myself that it’s worth my time to go to my professors’ office hours, I’ve just never been able to do it unless I have a very specific reason.

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DIY Templates

Posted on October 31, 2020 by Isabel Wong

Variations on a cake. Photo Credit: Isabel Wong

On October 31, 2020 I will become my sister.

We’re dressing up as each other for Halloween, which means I’ll have to wear leggings in 80ºF heat. More than a simple clothes swap, I’ll attend dance class and learn 75% of Hamilton lyrics. Boba will govern my stomach, thoughts of getting a puppy my dreams.

Conversely, my sister will wear too small shirts coupled with too large pants, everything that fits me still boxed in New York. She’ll wake up before the sun at 5 a.m. and sigh always and loudly. Writing a single email will take her two hours.

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Why am I writing a thesis?

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Teresa Brown

Amsterdam Ave. at night. Photo credit: Kristian Woerner.

Recently, I’ve found myself pondering the question: Why am I writing a thesis?

Now, I don’t think that there’s any specific right or wrong answer to this question. For some, writing a thesis is a natural extension of a project they have already been working on for a while. For others, the thesis is an opportunity to take a topic or research question of interest that they have always been intrigued by but never had the chance to pursue and to devote a significant amount of time to developing this project. Still others might have a personal connection to their topic of choice.

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No Thesis, No Shame

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Rhea Sahai

Photo Credit: Columbia School of Professional Studies

Most of the people in my life tend to be a bit surprised to learn that I’m not writing a thesis. After all, I write a blog that talks about research on campus, and it’s frequently assumed that an interest in research must mean an interest in writing a thesis. In fact, research and theses are so tied together that I’m not the only CC research ambassador to write about this subject— Isabel Wong wrote a beautiful piece on her decision to ultimately write a thesis. I spent the past year going back and forth on the idea of committing myself to this academic milestone. But every time I got close to deciding on doing a thesis, the time commitment spooked me. Prior to writing this piece I spoke to some of my friends who are writing a thesis. One friend estimated that he was spending 20 hours a week on his thesis. Another speculated that they were spending anywhere from 17 – 25 hours a week. 

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Making the Most of Meeting Professors

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Teresa Brown

Barnard College Library. Photo Credit: Teresa Brown

At the end of September I had to choose a “second reader” for my thesis. In the History
department, all students writing a thesis attend a year-long thesis seminar course. In addition to the professor for this course, who leads the class, each student is required to seek out a second reader. The second reader is ideally another professor of history whose research interests are similar to that of the student’s and thus can function as a sort of expert in the field and faculty mentor.

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On The “STEM/Humanities Divide” And Getting Messy

Posted on October 17, 2020 by Sara Bell

View from the lab trailer. Photo Credit: Sara Bell

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; ethanol-soaked fish sitting in jars, dried fish in Ziploc baggies piled in the fridge, icy fish biding time in the freezer. Fish seemed to occupy nearly every available storage space. I spent the whole summer in that tiny freshwater ecology lab at the University of California at Santa Cruz, slicing open mosquitofish with a scalpel, then pulling out their gonads to weigh them, so as to theorize the effect of water temperature on fish gravidity. 

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Cold Emails, Warm Conversations

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Isabel Wong

Empty hotels bearing hearts. Photo credit: Isabel Wong

A couple of days ago, I conferenced with my poetry professor. We had met for the first time in class the day before. Despite our near-stranger relationship, we talked for an hour and a half. 

According to my sister, I had never laughed so much during a call. Now, re-acclimating to gravity, the reality that I had work to do hit me. I had an email to write.

Emails, for me, are no simple affair. Despite the etiquette, the “Dear” at the beginning, the “Best” at the end, emails are pitted with writerly decisions. I am a very indecisive person, and this email’s conditions and stakes, I knew, could keep me up for weeks nibbling away at edits. 

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Let’s Be Informal

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Rhea Sahai

Photo Credit: Taylor Vick

My CC professor has a really beautiful outlook on research, and it’s one that I try to apply to all of my research work. She always used to say that research should only serve one purpose— to amplify knowledge. Yet instead, research is often used as a tool of obstruction. Big words and big phrases are used to intentionally confuse people from accessing the knowledge the research is purported to discuss. How many students have tried reading an extraordinarily dense piece of text, their eyes scanning the same words over and over again, without any actual meaning sinking in? But as soon as somebody explains the summary of the text to you, it suddenly all makes sense. It’s not that the material being discussed in research is confusing—it’s just the presentation of that material. 

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The Dreaded Cold-Email

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Sara Bell

Photo credit: University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries

So you need to cold-email a professor. Perhaps it’s someone you’ve had a large lecture with but never spoken to one-on-one, or someone you’ve been directed to by another professor—or maybe it’s someone you’ve truly never met. I’ve sent a good number of cold-emails in my time as a Columbia student, and I have a couple of tips I’ve picked up along the way. The most important thing to bear in mind is that however freaked out about cold-emailing you may be, the professor on the other end of the email isn’t likely to be surprised or read into the specific wording of your email too much. Professors receive a lot of email, including from people they don’t know. 

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