Researching the Self

Posted on September 22, 2020 by Isabel Wong

Resting trains at the West Side Yard. Photo Credit: Isabel Wong

Every few months, I will, without warning, run headlong into post-graduation panic. Having just woken up, I’ll meander into the kitchen, pop a slice of bread into the toaster and check my phone to learn my friend has landed an internship or my other friend is beginning the postgraduate fellowship essay grind. I am sent spiraling. Not so much from the news as from its movement. For whether they’re accepting or interviewing, each is on their way. Trunks loaded, snacks open and waiting, some already pressing foot to pedal. All of them operating in next steps. And here I am left, phone in hand, unsure where I’m going let alone whether by boat, by car, by plane, by foot.

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Camaraderie and the Core (on Zoom)

Posted on September 18, 2020 by Teresa Brown

Photo credit: Teresa Brown

A few weeks ago I started my senior year. Unlike any scenario I could have imagined 3 years ago when I began my journey at Columbia, I find myself seated in front of my laptop, some 2,895 miles from New York City.

I had no idea what classes on Zoom were going to be like. For better or worse, I was abroad in Spring of 2020 and, due to the different academic calendar of my university in Budapest, I didn’t experience the half-semester of Zoom classes that my peers who were on campus at Columbia had to adjust to. Rather, when I was sent home in March, my classes only had a single week left and all of my professors determined that it wasn’t worth it to attempt to schedule one or two final online meetings with students suddenly scattered all over the globe.

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Dancing With, Not Against, Time

Posted on September 7, 2020 by Isabel Wong

Dawn or dusk? Photo credit: Isabel Wong

I have a playlist called “compost” meant to house all the songs I’ve grown tired of and don’t want to actively listen to anymore but also don’t want to delete and risk losing forever. Someday, I imagine, nostalgia or historical curiosity or desire will compel me to return to these songs, and, like compost, they will find use again, perhaps just with a new purpose.

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REU – What does it mean, and what does it stand for?

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Teresa Brown

Preparing for the REU presentation. Photo credit: Teresa Brown.

So far, all of my posts have focused on historical research. But I started my journey at Columbia with the intention to major in mathematics and no plans to take a single history class. 

In the spring of my freshman year I was accepted into Columbia’s Mathematics Department’s Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). I was ecstatic. A year prior, when I had just been accepted to Columbia and declared my interest in majoring in mathematics, I had scoured the department’s webpage for classes and research opportunities. I planned to apply to the REU program maybe sophomore or junior year. It was a long-term goal I set for myself, but I found myself presented with this opportunity much sooner than I expected.

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The P3 in University Writing

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Sara Bell

Photo Credit: Regional rapid transit; a report to the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit Commission, 1953-1955.

One of my favorite icebreaker questions at Columbia is “What’d you write your P3 on?” The P3, for those uninitiated, is the Phase 3 essay in University Writing, a Core course required for all Columbia College and Engineering students. The course entails four essays: the first, a “critical response” essay, analyzing a problematic or unclear moment in a text; the second, analyzing an exhibit and defending a claim about it; the third, a longer research paper that requires you to use a variety of sources to make a claim about a controversy or exhibit; and the fourth, an op-ed. The last is probably the flashiest—some students end up publishing P4 essays in newspapers. But the third is, at its best, a labor of love: you’re given a fairly loose set of constraints and asked to come up with an argument you care about, to invest a sizable amount of time in it.

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A Researcher Without Research to Do

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Rhea Sahai

Photo Credit: Louis Reed. Photo obtained from unsplash.

A couple of weeks ago, I heard a mom shriek from my living room and ran to see my mom standing on top of a chair, pointing at a mouse scurrying across the floor. I shrieked and quickly climbed on to the same chair as her. I looked at my mom expectantly, waiting for her to go and save me from this four-legged fiend. She was waiting for me to save her, because apparently, once you learn how to handle mice for your neuroscience research, you become the official mouse-catcher in the house. In a tragic but funny way, that interaction with the poor mouse was the closest I felt to doing neuroscience research in months.

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Research in Your Own Backyard: Using Archives at Columbia and in NYC

Posted on August 21, 2020 by Teresa Brown

Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows (used during the Fair as the “New York City Building”). Photo credit: Teresa Brown

My first experience making use of a historical archive was spring of my sophomore year. I was taking a course called Making of the Modern American Landscape and we were assigned a final paper with little in terms of a prompt other than being instructed to use themes we learned about in class to research and write about some aspect of the history of the American built environment. I’ve always been intrigued by World’s Fairs, so I chose to write about the symbol of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair, a large, modernistic structure exhibited at the Fair that consisted of the spire-shaped Trylon and spherical Perisphere.

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How to Prepare for a Hurricane, How to Prepare for Research

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Isabel Wong

Coolers, jugs, gallons, bowls holding water. Photo credit: Isabel Wong.

I am waiting for Douglas. I am waiting for a hurricane.

A few days ago, around the time COVID-19 cases began spiking in the islands, news of a hurricane surfaced. As the storm barrelled across the Pacific Ocean, my family began preparations, bringing home cans of Spam and beans and scraping leaves out of gutters.

This morning, I woke to the sound of my father locking windows. In the kitchen, my mother rinsed old containers with watered-down bleach, instructing me to download a hurricane emergency guide onto my phone.

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The Core and the Libraries

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Sara Bell

Photo Credit: Sara Bell

My previous post betrays it: at risk of being nerdy even for a Columbia student, I’m a big fan of the Butler Library sixth floor reading rooms, the Avery Library folio shelves, the stacks in the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary. I could (and do!) rapturize about the specifics, but if you’re reading a blog about undergraduate research, you’re probably on the same page. What you might not be fully clued into, particularly if you’re a new student, are the number of ways you can use the libraries to help your academic work in Core Curriculum classes. Using the libraries in your Core classes in particular can help set you up to make better use of them as you move through your undergraduate work.

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Finding the Intersections in All Subjects

Posted on August 8, 2020 by Rhea Sahai

Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/@justjohnl

The summer before I got to Columbia as a freshman, I decided that I wanted to go to medical school. Looking back, the nine seasons of Grey’s Anatomy I watched that summer played no small part in that decision—Patrick Dempsey’s hair is the reason that thousands of pre-med students are suffering through organic chemistry at this very moment. But truly, medicine seemed like the perfect career for me. I knew that I wanted to go into a career that was STEM-related and I also knew that I wanted to have a positive impact. And ours is a society that paints doctors not just as people who have a positive impact, but as real-life heroes. It wasn’t until I took the class Marginalization in Medicine, with Professor Samuel Roberts, that my view of medicine changed. The more I learned about higher rates of maternal mortality in Black mothers, the more I learned about people dying from treatable diseases due to lack of healthcare, the more I learned about ways that access to medicine is used as a form of subjugation, the more obvious it became that health is both a biological and a political phenomenon. Health is at its core an intersectional subject, which is why we need an understanding of both science and humanities to deal with it.

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