...Columbia...

“Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.”
— Albert Einstein

Presumably one of the first things I should have done after my acceptance to SIPA was to learn more about Columbia University as a whole. Of course, given my current location, and life long inclination toward procrastination, this has only really happened since submitting my enrollment deposit to begin a Masters in International Affairs this August. So I’ve finally taken a moment to read up on this fine institution that I can now call “my school,” and holy jeebus am I stoked!

If you don’t care about the impressive facts and figures about Columbia, please stop reading now, but I can’t help share my excitement…I mean, who wouldn't be delighted to be a part of an institution that birthed radio, educated Barack Obama and Hunter S. Thompson, was a shooting location of (one of my favorite movies,) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and has the world's third largest collection of underground tunnels?!

According to my best friends google and wikipedia:

• Columbia has the most Nobel Prize affiliations of any institution in the world. It is home to the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, which, for over a century, has rewarded outstanding achievement in journalism, literature and music. It has been the birthplace of FM radio, the first American university to offer anthropology and political science as academic disciplines, and where the foundation of modern genetics was discovered. Its Morningside Heights campus was the first North American site where the uranium atom was split. Literary and artistic movements as varied as the Harlem Renaissance and post-colonialism all took shape within Columbia's gates in the 20th century
• Columbia University's extensive underground tunnel system is the third largest in the world following those of the Kremlin in Russia and those of MIT
• The college predating the university managed to produce many key leaders of the Revolutionary generation: John Jay, who negotiated the Treaty of Paris between the United States and Great Britain, ending the Revolutionary War, and who later became the first Chief Justice of the United States; Alexander Hamilton, military aide to General George Washington, author of most of the Federalist Papers, and the first Secretary of the Treasury; Gouverneur Morris, the author of the final draft of the United States Constitution; and Robert R. Livingston, a member of the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence
• The Columbia University Orchestra, founded in 1896, is the oldest continually operating university orchestra in the United States.
• On October 4, 2006, a group of left wing students stormed the stage of Columbia's Roone Arledge Auditorium, knocking over chairs and tables and disrupted a speech by Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, a group that purports to patrol the border between the United States and Mexico, invited to campus by the Columbia College Republicans. The students took the stage and unfurled a banner that stated, in Spanish, English, and Arabic, "No human being is illegal."
• Each October, students join in on a run while singing the Columbia fight song, naked, surrounded by a crowd
• With forty days remaining until graduation, seniors drink 40oz malt liquor on the steps of Low Library to celebrate their impending graduation. In 2005, President Bollinger was exiting Low Library and was approached by a drunken student on the steps who proceeded to slap him on the butt.
• Columbia was the first North American site where the Uranium atom was split. It was the birthplace of FM radio and laser[60]. MPEG-2 algorithm of transmitting high quality audio and video over limited bandwidth was developed by Dimitris Anastassiou, Columbia University professor of electrical engineering. Biologist Martin Chalfie was the first to introdue the use of Green Fluorescent Protein or GFP in labelling cells in intact organisms. Other inventions and products related to Columbia include Sequential Lateral Solidifcation (SLS) technology for making LCDs, System Management Arts (SMARTS), System Initiation Protocol (SIP) (which is used for audio, video, chat, instant messaging and whiteboarding), pharmacopeia, Macromodel (a software for computational chemistry), a new and better recipe for glass concrete, Blue LEDs, Beamprop (used in photonics).
• Columbia ranks among the tops in revenues earned from patents and license agreements on its inventions and discoveries. The Science and Technology Ventures of Columbia University currently manages some 600 patents and more than 250 active license agreements. Patent-related deals earned Columbia more than $230 million in the 2006 fiscal year. In 2004, Columbia made $178 million (compared to $24 million made by Harvard)
• Alumni and Attenders include: two former Presidents of the United States, six Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States and 39 Nobel Prize winners, three United States Senators and 16 current Chief Executives of Fortune 500 companies, as well as three of the 25 richest Americans.Other significant figures in American history to attend the university were John L. O'Sullivan, the journalist who coined the phrase "manifest destiny", Alfred Thayer Mahan, the geostrategist who wrote on the significance of sea power, John Jay, Founding Father, diplomat and First Chief Justice of the United States, and progressive intellectual Randolph Bourne.
• More recent political figures educated at Columbia include current U.S. Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, conservative commentators Patrick J. Buchanan and Norman Podhoretz, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank Alan Greenspan, George Stephanopoulos, Senior Advisor to former US President Bill Clinton, George Pataki, the former governor of New York State, and Mikhail Saakashvili, the current President of the country of Georgia.
  
• In culture and the arts, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, screenwriters Sidney Buchman and I.A.L. Diamond, critic and biographer Tim Page and musician Art Garfunkel are all among Columbia's alumni. The poets Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca, Joyce Kilmer and John Berryman, the writers Eudora Welty, Isaac Asimov, J. D. Salinger, Upton Sinclair, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Phyllis Haislip, Roger Zelazny, Herman Wouk, Hunter S. Thompson, and Paul Auster, the playwright Tony Kushner, the architects Robert A. M. Stern, Ricardo Scofidio and Peter Eisenman, the composer Béla Bartók also attended the university

Woohoo! Ivies or bust! (kidding....kinda of).