The Low Down

By Caroline Ceniza-Levine '93BC of the Columbia Career Coaches Network
This article originally appeared on SixFigureStart.com 

As we're midway through the year, it's a good time to measure your current career satisfaction. Are you happy where you are, or do you need to make changes? Here are 10 questions to help you gauge your career satisfaction and pinpoint what, if anything, needs to change.

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.)

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. 

By Eric Horwitz '90CC of the Columbia Career Coaches Network

Having a strong foundation of education is critical to an informed citizen in a free market society. A mixture of moral clarity and scientific reasoning can form the foundation for an active life of contributing and receiving abundance. Since the beginning of the university system, great men and eventually women were sequestered in a search for these empirical truths. Education is meant to develop individuals into contributing members of the social fabric.

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

Exclusive events, a new membership opportunity, and valuable career advice in this week's roundup. 

Inspiring alumnae, Legends of the Ivy League, and trailblazing Law graduates in this week's Low Down roundup: 

Did you know that over 7,400 Columbia couples met and fell in love through Columbia?

Some were hit by Cupid's arrow on the first day of classes, while others connected years later through the Columbia alumni network. 

With Valentine's Day just around the corner, we've compiled a few of our favorite Columbia love stories—written and shared by our alumni—that would give Nicholas Sparks a run for his money.  

Do you have your own Columbia love story to share?  E-mail us your story and photo(s) to: [email protected].

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If you thought that the fictional 'Indominus‍ Rex' in the sci-fi adventure film Jurassic World was big, just wait until you get a glimpse of the real-life remains of the enormous titanosaur that has recently invaded NYC's American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).

This 122-foot-long beast (about the length of three school buses - or twenty-two Alma Maters placed side-by-side) is a species so new that it has not yet been formally named by the team of paleontologists who discovered it - a team led by Dr. Jose Luis Carballido and Columbia alumnus, Dr. Diego Pol '04GSAS.

In 2012, a local rancher in southern Argentina reported that he found fossils on his land to the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio in Argentina. 

By 2014, Dr. Pol and his team of paleontologists excavated 223 fossil bones belonging to six titanosaur dinosaurs at the site, including an 8-foot-tall femur bone now on exhibit at AMNH.  These giant herbivores roamed the earth some 100 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous period. 

By measuring the length and circumference of the femur, Dr. Pol and his team estimate that the behemoth dino may have tipped the scale at 70 tons - more than 10 African elephants. 

Photo: Pol next to the femur of the behemoth titanosaur via BBC News. 

How does one go about measuring the size of a prehistoric daunting dino? In this video, Dr. Pol explains how the measuring process works. 

Today, you too can marvel at this prehistoric wonder at AMNH, where the titanosaur has invaded not one, but two rooms at the museum. It dwarfs AMNH's famous blue whale by nearly 30 feet (although the blue whale still takes the crown in mass, weighing as much as 200 tons, or 3x as much as the titanosaur).

Photo: PBS NewsHour via AMNH

Congratulations, Dr. Pol, for the incredible discovery. And for the record, we think "Columbia-osaur" has a nice ring to it, if you're brainstorming names.  

You may have pulled all-nighters or stolen a kiss or two in the stacks of Butler, but here are 8 things you may not know about Columbia's preeminent library. 

1. Butler Library houses more than two million books. (That's six times the number of Columbia alumni we have on record.)

2. Butler Library was funded by Columbia Law alumnus, Edward Harkness, who also supported original portions of the Columbia University Medical Center.  In 1918, he was ranked the 6th-richest person in the United States by Forbes magazine's first "Rich List."

Photo of Edward Harkness (You can tell he enjoyed a good book.)

3. The library's facade features inscriptions of the names of 18 writers, philosophers, and thinkers, including: Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Vergil, Horace, Tacitus, St. Augustine, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, and Goethe. Of the 18, only Demosthenes has never been required reading in the history of the undergraduate Core Curriculum. 

4. Dan Futterman '89CC wrote parts of the screenplay Capote in Butler Library. He told Columbia College Today: “As anyone knows, normal people in NYC can’t afford apartments with office space. Having a free office (actually, a daily choice of a few of them) up the road from our place on 105th Street was an enormous blessing. If I wanted solitude, I’d go hide at a desk in the Butler stacks. If I wanted to people-watch while I wrote (which I often do), I’d go to Avery or the East Asian Library — each attracts a different crowd."

5. Areas of Butler remain open 24/7 during the academic year. Remember this scene?

6. The range of collections in Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library, located on the 6th Floor of Butler, spans more than 4,000 years, 500,000 books, and 14 miles of letters, records, and manuscripts, including three “noble fragments” of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible. 

7. In 1934, Columbia had to move 22 miles of books from Low Library to the new Butler Library. The solution? A giant slide. 

 8. Columbia's libraries, including Butler, provide greater access to alumni than any other Ivy League institution. All Columbia University alumni who have earned an undergraduate or graduate degree are eligible for lifelong reading privileges at Butler. Take advantage!

In our humble opinion, this is the most magnificent library in town.