The Met. Photo Credit: Juliet Paiva
Arguably, the two most defining features of the undergraduate experience at Columbia are the core curriculum and the school’s location in New York City. One of my favorite parts about Columbia has been the freedom to explore the city and the variety of experiences it has to offer that stand out from any other US city. I’ve spent my whole life living in cities and love the fast-paced environment, the unique mixtures of people with different backgrounds and stories, the general feeling of independence that surprisingly breeds a collective identity, and the unique opportunities that come with all of these things occurring in one place. But life at Columbia is also marked by the core curriculum, giving undergraduates an expansive and unified liberal arts education regardless of their specific fields of study. The core fosters a special form of community, an invisible string that connects Columbia College students and alumni across time and space. While the core and the city are two distinctive elements of life at Columbia, we can easily overlook the spaces where they overlap and the rare learning that takes place there.
One thing that has always surprised me about the core curriculum is the amount of learning that occurs beyond the actual texts we read or pieces of art we look at or listen to. I’ve always found that in core classes I learned just as much from my peers and their experiences as I did from my instructors. I don’t mean to undermine the significant impact my core professors have had on my undergraduate experience, but I want to draw attention to the incredible value that being around people with different perspectives gives to learning. The core is special because we each come to the same questions with completely different backgrounds and viewpoints, fostering a shared process of intellectual inquiry that’s shaped by our unique strengths and academic curiosities. I think the way the core is supplemented by the people who physically make up its classes is similar to the way these classes are enriched by the surrounding environment of New York City.
Whether organized through a class or independently, a lot can be gained from approaching the core through the lens of the city around us and exploring the city through the insight we take from our core classes. As Elia’s blog post from September illustrates through her considerations of Contemporary Civilizations texts in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the city around us offers countless spaces to expand on the knowledge we gain in the classroom. Each Music Humanities class steps beyond the curriculum of the Western musical canon to take the 1 train to Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera. For Columbia students, one of our required classes involves witnessing breathtaking live music within one of the most historic musical landmarks in the country. Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) was the first opera I’d ever seen and I did so in the company of my Music Hum class. Sitting in the velvet seats of the Met Opera house and listening to the resounding voices of the singers gave me new insight into the discussions of classical music we previously had inside the classroom.
The experience of actually witnessing the pieces of art we read and speak about or meditating on a philosophical text while walking through a space of worship intensifies the core experiences. Taking the core curriculum in New York City allows us to step beyond the words
printed on a page and consider how the important ideas we deal with factor into the world around us. While class trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art are already a common practice for most Lit Hum classes, I find that solo expeditions into the city shed new light on my intellectual pursuits. Undergraduate life at Columbia is a difficult and unique college experience, but it can also be incredibly rewarding. It often feels impossible to fully take advantage of all Columbia and the city has to offer, but you can start by taking the two most defining features—the core and the city—and combining the two.