CCRA | CC Research Ambassadors

Butler Library with tents and risers set up for graduation (photo courtesy of Ishaan Barrett)

In such an interdisciplinary field as urban studies, it can be hard to determine exactly one place or department in which to house or even propose a research project. In fact, the broad disciplinary foundations of the urban studies program—ranging from economics and anthropology to environmental science and sociology—is one of the many reasons I’ve come to love my major. In a field with so much breadth, proposing a research project or jumping off point can be challenging when the multiple academic apartments and fields of study can plausibly come weigh in on the trajectory of your project. The Urban Studies field not the only academic area where this interdisciplinary aspect of research rings true. Even the “clean cut” academic departments at Columbia house overlaps: economics and mathematics, history and sociology, economics and political science, to name a few. With a bit more work, one can find even more complex overlaps between various academic departments and fields when research is concerned. The binary “Venn diagram” of academic overlaps in research can further complexify as the scope and focus of your project shifts or draws on other methods.

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We’ve all been in that room. Maybe it was your closest class friend. Maybe it was your unspoken class nemesis. Or maybe it was even you. But we’ve all been there when the professor cold calls someone in LitHum or CC to discuss the reading, and instead they launch into a five-minute spiel about their life. Perhaps it was a Marxian reading of Flex Dollars. Perhaps a Vindication on the Rights of Boarding Schools. Maybe even what their Biology class has to say today about Darwin’s theory of evolution and how that makes people in STEM overqualified for the Core.

Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, when you were in that room, you probably rolled your eyes, highlighted a new quote, and mentally prepared to shoot your hand up first with your rehearsed points in tow. For many of us in the humanities who enter a Core classroom, we assume we have it locked down with CC and LitHum analysis. You might have watched your friends struggle over a GenChem problem set, but reading the entire Leviathan in one night was a breeze. And while I do agree it can be quite frustrating to feel like the only one doing the reading or who knows what’s going on in the class, unfortunately, we are not. 

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St. Luke Drawing the Virgin, by Rogier van der Weyden, mid-15th century (credit: Wikipedia)

Conducting interviews for a research project can be difficult. As an undergraduate, you’ve only just started to learn about your topic—whether industrial-labor relations in the Old West or modern-day separatist movements in Catalonia and Quebec. Your respondents, on the other hand, depending on the project, will either be experts in their fields or people who have experienced first-hand what you’ve only studied from afar. You’re afraid that you might come off as uninformed, insensitive, or banal. You’re afraid that the interview won’t go anywhere, that you’ll waste your time and that of your subject.

These are persistent anxieties that I’ve had to navigate and overcome. Three summers ago, as a Laidlaw Scholar, I spent two months interviewing journalists and academics about the impact of large language models on American and British newsrooms. I had never conducted an interview before (not even for a school newspaper!) and, in retrospect, had very little idea of what I was getting myself into. I made plenty of mistakes, learned on the fly, and came out of the summer with 21 conversations that I then cobbled together into a long-form research paper. It was an arduous but rewarding process. To make your interviewing experience a little less arduous and, hopefully, a little more rewarding, here are some tips and tricks I picked up along the way:

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Madonna and Child, Simone Martini, MET

When I was assigned my first paper in Literature Humanities three years ago, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. The paper could be about any aspect of the Iliad, a topic that seemed incredibly rich yet also strangely sterile—what new perspective or insight could I bring to this book that had been read and thought about for thousands of years? 

What seemed particularly daunting was achieving a balance between a thesis that was too obvious (for example, that the gods of the Iliad often behave like humans) and one that was too far-fetched (for example, that Homer wanted to trivialize the gods’ divinity and power). Or, to take another example, it seemed intuitive to say that fate played a large role in the Iliad, but to be taking things too far to say that everything that happens in the epic is predestined and the characters have no free will.

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