One assignment in particular stands out in my memory. In Greg’s class, I learned that academic writing didn’t have to exist in an ivory tower removed from society, and could instead shape our understanding of it. This bit of serendipity landed me in a section taught by Greg Pardlo SOA’16, an author and academic who won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry the following spring. What Core class or experience do you most remember, and why?ĭue to a scheduling conflict, I ended up switching at the last minute from Frontiers of Science to University Writing. That little room taught me something very important: No matter how cramped your place is, you can still make it home. During the spring semester, I remember our weekly ritual: toiling over FroSci problem sets on Thursday nights and then putting our work away and diving into absurdly competitive games of Catan on the patch of floor between my bed and the desk. My closest friends lived in other dorms, but we always found ourselves hanging out in my room, probably because John Jay was the perfect mix of quiet and social. The room key was a clunky piece of plastic that was too long to fit in any wallet, which meant that I never really got in the habit of taking it with me and locked myself out way too many times. I lived on an unrenovated floor in John Jay, which gave my room “character” and made me feel less bad about hanging posters and string lights on my wall using notoriously hard-to-remove sticky hooks. What do you remember about your first-year living situation? But in the process, I got to know myself and realized that exploring, while not always easy, could lead to formative moments of self-discovery. Soon, I realized that most first-year friendships don’t last and most of those classes were not fun. Later, in the classroom, I lost sight of my passions for reading and music and instead signed up for courses in economics, psychology, and basically any subject area I hadn’t studied before. The summer before school started, I tried to make friends with as many people as possible through the Class of 2018 Facebook group, hopeful that once we were all on campus, I could make up for the social interactions I had lacked in high school. In retrospect, I realize that these experiences endowed me with a curiosity and love of learning I carry to this day, but in the moment, I just wanted to get away from what was familiar. I had been homeschooled for eight years by my dad, a retired historian, and then spent four years at the Stanford Online H.S. For me, moving to New York represented an opportunity to assert my independence. When I arrived on campus, I thought I had it all figured out, but I was wrong. Where was I going? Looking back, I have no idea. A guy who became one of my close friends later in our first year recalled seeing me speed-walking through the quad in shorts with that ubiquitous iced coffee even as the fall breezes picked up and the weather grew cooler. I had (and still have) a penchant for drinking large cups of black iced coffee no matter how cold it is outside. What were you like when you arrived at Columbia? Before then he will serve as an AmeriCorps fellow at the Alaska Public Defender Agency in Anchorage. He will start at Harvard Law School in 2021 with the goal of becoming a public interest attorney focused on impact litigation and criminal justice reform. A music and English major at the College, Nielsen has published articles on literary topics such as the dramatic purpose of song in The Winter’s Tale and Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptions of Shakespeare’s plays. Thomas Nielsen ’18 is a legal fellow at a small civil litigation firm in Baltimore, where he researched and co-wrote a book on bankruptcy law in Maryland.
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