CCRA | CC Research Ambassadors

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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Image overlooking the Adams Morgan Neighborhood in Washington, DC on the Fourth of July, before the fireworks on Capitol Hill (Photo courtesy of Ishaan Barrett)

Imagine for a minute all the spaces that define your life at Columbia: the classrooms where seminars unfold, the lecture halls alive with presentations, the labs buzzing with quiet concentration, and libraries where the daytime hours bleed into the night. Over time, these places stitch themselves together into a web, one familiar and enriched by the places we revisit, but also oddly enclosing. For all its intricacy and complexity, the web of places we might spend our time as students is bounded. Sure, you might venture off campus during the day or throughout the weekend, but when we scrutinize where we spend the academic hours of our days, few extend beyond Morningside or even Columbia’s campus. Intentionally or not, campus builds a physical and invisible boundary that subtly separates how we spend our time and the worlds we come to know. The same can be said for research and the questions, inspired by coursework and mentorship, that we undertake as students. Research conducted within our web of campus spaces is often confined there, but this need not always be the case. 

As you consider beginning or continuing campus research—either in a lab or independently through a fellowship—the question of public research (and even researching public issues) should come to bear. 

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Frankfurt’s Bankenviertel district, seen from the Bockenheimer Anlage (credit: Joseph Karaganis)

Like most other Columbia undergraduates, I was first introduced to the work of Immanuel Kant halfway through my sophomore year. Kant’s slim-but-dense ethical treatise, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, is the second text that students read in Contemporary Civilization’s second half.

At the time, I had just finished a year and a half of philosophy courses, and after much deliberation had decided to declare a philosophy major. My previous coursework in Greek and Roman ethics and metaphysics had served me well during the first semester of CC, and I was expecting that the course would go as smoothly in the spring. But I was less prepared than I thought. Despite being only 70 pages long, the Groundwork is brilliant, bewildering, and infuriating all at once. It encapsulates the stunning depth of thought and impassable esotericism that, for better or worse, characterizes much of the best of German philosophy. By the end of the book’s first section, I was uneasy. By the end of the second, I was quietly panicking, and had started to nervously goggle technical terms that I was unfamiliar with. By the end of the third and final section, I had to admit to myself that I was completely lost.

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Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, British National Portrait Gallery

When I first learned about the Humanities Research Scholars Program during winter break of my sophomore year, I felt both daunted and excited. I had never done any kind of research before, and I had no idea of what topic I would want to spend a summer studying. But at the same time, the prospect of spending six weeks immersing myself in a particular subject—reading and thinking about it, discussing it with peers, maybe even writing about it—was enormously exciting.

I spent a lot of time over the break thinking about what I might want to research. It was hard, because a lot of my favorite books were translated, and I didn’t think I could properly study them without knowing their original language. Eventually I thought about Oscar Wilde—I had gone through a phase at the end of high school where I read a bunch of his books and a biography of him. But what could I possibly say about Wilde that hadn’t been said already?

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Reading Imperial Cartography: Ming-Qing Historical Maps in the Library of Congress, courtesy of C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University

“Map of Sea Lanes of the Eastern and Southern Seas,” Dongyang nanyang haidao tu, courtesy of the First Historical Archives of China, Beijing

This summer, my research project centers on islands as crucial protagonists in investigating the literary representation of “foreignness” in early modern East Asian and Mediterranean contexts. I derived my fascination with the topic of “islands” as alternative spaces where civilizations negotiate their boundaries from my long-term academic interest at the intersection of textual and visual media, regional studies and comparative literature, and the broader historical issues of “the early modern period.” While double-majoring in East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, I benefited from taking a rich spectrum of courses that provided me a solid knowledge foundation to “think textualities with islands” (my foremost conceptual emphasis in the project), grounded in bibliographic and archival tracings in each tradition in tandem with shifting theoretical visions on what constitutes the maritime. Drawing on sources from different “genres” of texts, including vernacular novels, official histories, diplomatic writings, as well as visual representations, I invite the complex question of “the ethics of comparison” into the conceptualization of “islands” at the crossroads of languages, empires, and the heterogeneous group of historical agents.

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