When I first stepped on campus it was completely different than anything I had
ever thought of. It just felt like a historic place a special place.
Being surrounded by everyone who really inspires you I think it kind of pushed
me to do more. Seeing the accomplishments that my peers
are able to make it's a really cool feeling to be part of such an ambitious
community. I fell in love with being in New York City I fell in love with the
diversity here and the people that I met every semester like three of our five
professors are just like world-famous which is like ridiculous right but that's
true across like all departments and programs here at Columbia. Debating books,
debating pieces of art debating meaning behind that, I stepped back from my own
perspective and I started looking at the world around me in a broader context.
I've really seen people grow in ways that I never could have imagined I feel
like I've grown so much myself.
You realize that you're part of a university that has had so many
incredible people come before you and all of a sudden you're part of that as well.
Coming to Columbia was the first time that I had a chance to experience
different things and one of the things I really enjoyed was changing seasons.
I think fall is a really exciting time at Columbia it's a time of excitement
it's a time of change. It's all these new students are coming in and they're
getting adjusted to Columbia. At Columbia I met students from all over the world
from all continents from Australia to my neighbors from Bulgaria.
I'm from Shanghai China. Cape Coral Florida. Originally from Nigeria. Holden Maine.
And everyone had such different experiences and such different stories I don't know
how to explain but like the international students we all have like
something in common like the fact that we are international brought you
together exactly knowing that you go to a university with not just like-minded
individuals but open-minded individuals it was something that I wanted to be
part of.
Learning from somebody who has a different background from you is a very
very eye-opening experience. Engineering is all about seeing things from
different perspectives and being able to understand multiple perspectives to
solve one common project is gonna be something I use for the rest of my life.
You just have so many different people that believe so many different things
and exhibit those things in different ways that you're almost forced to at
least engage with the ideas that people have and the value that that brings to
just like your conversations your projects like everything you do it's
really remarkable.
Winter is the best season for
New York City and the best season for Columbia. You get to experience New York
in the holidays which is maybe the most magical thing a human being can do.
The core curriculum is the backbone of the Columbia experience. Studying in the
School of Engineering and Applied Science
you take basically a third of the core. For me something really important was
being able to not just go into engineering, just going to mathematics I
always wanted more. You end up taking classes that maybe you
wouldn't have picked otherwise. I assumed I wasn't interested in science - learned a
lot about neuroscience learned about psychology learned about ecology.
We spend multiple years in these small seminar classes surrounded by 18 to 20
other students who come from totally different backgrounds than you and you
have very difficult conversations with those people but in a very respectful
manner. You read the same set of books you go through the same set of
discussions you ask the same big questions and it was just cool for
everybody to be coming at the texts from different experiences but kind of all
talking about the same thing. And that's one of the ways that you make really
good friends here at Columbia is through those conversations and it's not
necessarily people who you always agree with. The core I would say is both an
academic and a personal growth curriculum. It shifts from just being a
descriptive conversation about what you read or what you see and it turns into
why did you read what you read, why do you look at a painting and see what you
see, why is my perspective different from the person's across from me. I think what
the Core has given me is really fundamentally a perspective shift and
what it's led me to is a focus on creating new and real solutions to
problems that I see in my own world.
Tree-lighting is a great example of a
community tradition that we have. There are performances by acapella groups free
chocolate free donuts
what Lorenzo my friend always says as we're walking down college walk he said
I will never get tired of this walk.
so it's a really cool way to celebrate the
transition into the winter
last year we had a crazy snowstorm everyone was enjoying themselves so much
a lot of people hadn't seen snow before they've come here.
There's a sense of
unity and it's a really fun thing to share with your friends and just like
brings the entire community together in a really in a really cool way
I love spring because it's getting warmer out so there are more people
coming out on campus. Once the snow melts you'll see everyone on low steps just
sitting there and basking in the sun
The cool thing about Columbia's campus is you're kind of in your own little
world within the city of New York. You walk in through any of the sets of gates
that line our campus and it's just silent. I see my friends walking through campus no
matter what day it is.
You see students lying on the grass you see people
playing frisbee. We have restaurants that we go to our favorite coffee shops in
Morningside Heights. They become your hangout spots your study spots. And
that's a really remarkable thing and something that really fosters like the
college experience that you get here at Columbia. My favorite part of campus is
definitely the Amsterdam bridge. Lerner Hall. Butler Library. Low Steps. Low
Steps. Low Steps. Favorite spot on campus is definitely Low Steps.
But the Columbia experience is not only a classroom experience. That's probably
another kind of big point about Columbia students - regardless of what their
particular interest is they all care about like things outside of these gates.
There's a Whitney Biennial going on I think it's like America's leading young
artists right now and one exhibition.. New York City offers everything no
matter what you're studying no matter what you're interested at the moment you
can kind of go out and explore those different passions.
And the cool thing about going to Columbia is that we can get a lot of
these things either free or severely discounted price.
And because we're in the city we can really intern in parallel with classes. I
was always interested in politics. My first week of school actually I started
out working for someone who was getting elected to City Council. I don't think
that's an opportunity I would have gotten anywhere else. This summer I had
an internship at the American Museum of Natural History where I was doing
biology research; I was able to live on campus and commute to the museum.
Engineers at Columbia go on to work for law firms, for marketing companies,
nonprofit organizations. New York as a city has pretty much every industry you
could possibly think of and seeing that diversity of application of engineering
was very eye-opening to me as a freshman engineering student.
If you are passionate about something, Columbia
gives you the platform and all the resources that allow you to pursue it.
'next a broader set of arguments relate to secular stagnation. I am not persuaded
by those theories' For me it happened to be research with Nobel laureate
professor Joseph Stiglitz. For others it might be another goal but I believe that
Columbia has met has even exceeded my expectations.
Buildings and the campus and the programs and all this make it nice but by far the
best thing about Columbia is the people. The people. The people. The people are
amazing in so many different ways. I think that people come here for each
other. To be connected to the people who are going to lead all these different
industries that's definitely something that's very unique to Columbia and the
opportunities that this education and this degree afford to you.
The people who come here are going to go do great things like there's no doubt
about that but it's really more about pushing the
world in the right direction that really guides what we do. At Columbia
engineering there is this fundamental emphasis that what you build isn't good
for its own sake but rather good for the society that it's meant to impact.
Columbia is a place that's like ever-growing ever-changing and at the
end of the day we're true to our values.
It's the challenge and the motivation that I'm not going to accept my world the
way I see it I'm going to leave my own mark on it I'm going to create my own
solutions to the issues that I see that has been really really formative for my
time at Columbia.