The Low Down

Check out the latest from your Columbia alumni community.

For Rita Pietropinto-Kitt, the decision to become an alumni leader was an obvious one.

"The Future Is..." is a mini-series all about Columbia alumnae who are the leaders of today and creators of tomorrow. This podcast is produced by Shanna Crumley '18SIPA and the Columbia Alumni Association. 

When seventeen-year-old Julia Bacha '03GS arrived at Columbia, she had no idea that she would become a filmmaker, much less one far away in the Middle East. Yet that's how Bacha works best: by following her instincts. That journalistic instinct is what led her on a journey from studying Middle Eastern history at Columbia to advocating for justice as an award-winning documentary filmmaker.

Bacha has served 12 years as the creative director at Just Vision, a nonprofit that documents the work of Israelis and Palestinians using nonviolent resistance to the occupation to bring freedom, dignity, and equality to both societies. As part of her advocacy, she has also given two TED talks about women and nonviolence in conflict and shown her work at the Sundance, Berlin, and Tribeca film festivals.

Bacha's work has been profiled by BBC, HBO, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, and The Economist, and screened at widely diverse settings, from Palestinian refugee camps and villages to the halls of the American Congress and European Parliament. Her TED talk, "Pay Attention to Nonviolence," was selected as one of the best talks of 2011 by TED curators and has been viewed by over half a million people.

A new Columbia Alumni Association (CAA) initiative aims to bring alumni together around one shared passion: wine.

Alumna Lynn Berger '84, '90TC, of the Columbia Career Coaches Network, weighs in on how to make a successful career change.

Persistence is key when making a career transition. Harmonize your ambition with a capacity for patience.

By Judy Liu '96BC, '98PH of the Columbia Career Coaches Network
This article originally appeared on Strenua.

The most basic relationship is a transactional relationship. A transactional relationship involves barter or trade. It is often limited in scope and does not create any long-term benefits. When pursuing a successful career in an ever-challenging world, we need to remind ourselves that our success depends on transformative relationships.

Here's what you need to know from the Columbia Alumni Association (CAA) this week.

Here's the latest from your Columbia alumni community.

In this episode, we'll hear from a recent graduate who has been a champion of human rights and underrepresented groups since her time as a student leader on campus. I called Ayushi Roy '14CC in Oakland, CA, to hear about her work in public policy and her transition to graduate school at MIT this fall.

Ayushi graduated from Columbia College in 2014 with degrees in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, and Human Rights. She was active on and off campus around issues of migration and gender, working with the Intercultural Resource Center, the Columbia Political Review, and student-led Title IX groups, among others. After graduating, Ayushi stayed in New York for a year to work on her social venture, a sexual violence text-based hotline that won the first the Columbia Innovation Award.

She went on to serve as a Coro Fellow in Public Policy in San Francisco before transitioning to Oakland City Hall's first Civic Design Lab. She is beginning a master’s program in Urban Policy at MIT this fall

To learn more about sexual violence response and mental health at Columbia, visit health.columbia.edu.

Check out the latest from your Columbia community in this week's roundup.