The Low Down

By Alveena Bakhshi '03SIPA

 
Bakhshi is an advocate for Child Soldiers International, a group that aims to stop and end all recruitment, use, and exploitation of children by armed forces and groups. She is an adviser to the SIPA Dean's Public Policy Challenge Grant and a mentor with Columbia's Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator. Below, she explains her work with the organization, as well as what inspired her to write a book of poetry as an homage to child soldiers. (Photos courtesy of UNICEF.)

The latest events, news, and ideas from your Columbia alumni community:

Odds are good that you’ve heard of Jack Dorsey. He’s the co-founder of Twitter and the co-founder of the mobile payment company, Square. In 2013, Dorsey gave a talk at Columbia and, at the time, it was the largest entrepreneurship event in Columbia history, attracting over 1,000 Columbia students, alumni, and friends. Since we’ve been digging into the archives lately, we thought we’d play you some highlights from that keynote address during which he talks about how he turned his obsession with urban maps, punk music, art, and coding into a micro blog that has changed the way we communicate.

Congratulations to the Columbians who made the Crain's New York Business "Most Powerful Women 2017" list. Read on to learn about these powerful and trailblazing alumnae leaders from Crain's and check out the complete list of 50 here. 

Last year, Kristin Myers gave a lecture to Columbia alumni returning to campus for reunion. Myers is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and her talk offered an engineering perspective on why women give birth preterm. Specifically, she explored the biomechanics of pregnancy and how engineers work with clinicians to try to understand why some women give birth before term and how we can stop it. You’re about to hear some excerpts from her talk.

Check out the latest news and events from the Columbia community.

By Cynthia Indriso '86PH of the Columbia Career Coaches Network
This post originally appeared on CynthiaIndriso.com
 

Direct, open and honest communication is an essential characteristic of any kind of successful relationship as well as a high performing and engaged workplace, yet it’s commonly a big challenge for many of our clients, especially when the message is "negative" and requires a change in behavior.

If you haven’t heard of the Columbia Center for Jazz Studies, that’s a shame, but we can’t be too disappointed in you. After all, the center is still relatively new. It was founded in 1999 and, since then, it has been integrated into the Core Curriculum at Columbia College. That means a lot of College students are getting exposed to music that isn’t exactly topping the charts nowadays.

But the Center for Jazz Studies takes a more broad view of the genre than one might initially think. Courses at the center look at jazz as it relates to technology, community, innovation, and even neurology. It’s that last approach that you’re going to hear about in this episode.

Groundbreaking research and Columbians reuniting—check out this week's Low Down roundup: 

By Caroline Ceniza-Levine '93BC of the Columbia Career Coaches Network 

Most professionals intuitively understand the value of executive presence, but how do you fix it? A good first step is to review the list of 10 factors that employers and recruiters assess when gauging executive presence. Just translating an amorphous concept like "executive presence" into specific components can give you a checklist to assess yourself. But, you might not be the best grader—maybe you're too hard on yourself or not honest enough.