Here are some more activities to keep Mom and Dad busy because Bwog loves you and your parents and because Bwog has secret tour guide aspirations....

Wallach Art Gallery

Columbia has its own mini-museum in Schermerhorn! Who knew? The Wallach Gallery's classy digs will undoubtedly impress your parents. Maybe you'll even impress them with your Art Hum skills. Except the gallery is currently exhibiting Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj, which doesn't fall into the masterpieces of Western Art category. But it's free and that's always a crowd pleaser.

Inwood Park

If you're going to the Baker Field for the football game, be sure to pass through Inwood Park on your way back. Located just beyond the stadium, Inwood Park is a lovely copse-filled plot of land on the very tip of Manhattan island. The northern edge of the park offers views of both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers and makes a great place for a picnic. For additional fun, try to spot the Columbia boathouse and the big 'C' rock.

Leonard and Louise Riggo has given $5 million to the Department of Art History and Archaeology. $3 million will establish two professors in the department, one in African Art, and the other of the department's choice. The rest is divided evenly between undergrads and grads for internships, thesis research, traveling expenses, and etc.

Leonard is no John Kluge--and $5 million is no $400--but at least he likes books.

Philosophy is a great major if you have deep insights into the metaphysical puzzlements of human existence. The problem is not the scant few undergrads who have deep insights about the metaphysical puzzlements of human existence, but the glut who think they do. Could you tolerate that guy in CC who thought that Kant's Groundwork was "solidly argued, though ultimately, existentially unconvincing"? He's probably a philosophy major.

And the professors—the people who have made careers of claiming special insight about the nature of existence—think it is a mark of their intellectual prowess not to teach undergraduate classes. Or answer e-mails. Or show up to office hours. When your other liberal arts-majoring friends are struggling to decide which of their chummy professor-friends will write their fellowship recommendations, you'll realize you've never taken a seminar.

But at least you get to sound like hot shit at office parties, right? Think you can drop some Deleuze and Derrida and leave them all fawning? Stop it right there, buddy. That's comp lit. Any real philosopher knows that stuff is crap. And don't even get started about the meaning of life here—there's a reason Columbia has lost three renowned political philosophers in under a decade. Face the facts, dilettante-to-be: a philosophy degree won't even make you a moderately competent poseur.

Art History

Art history requires learning a little about a few disparate topics, and the sum is considerably less than its parts. In Greek Art and Architecture, one learns how to date ancient vases, while in a Gothic architecture survey, one reads arguments about which philosophies influenced the design of 13th century French cathedrals. Then you get to the 20th century, where the shit really hits Duchamp's urinal. Mostly, you learn great sound bites to impress nubile MoMA visitors: Picasso was terrified of contracting VD, and may or may not have actually done so, which may or may not be important to understanding his depictions of women; Mondrian's entire career can be understood as an attempt to produce a completely flat picture plane; Robert Rauschenberg's Monogram is a " very ejaculatory" work. Thank you, Professor Krauss.

It's like, art, dude.

Creative Writing

Everyone's a poet. Still more think they're short story writers or, worse, novelists. Far fewer claim to be playwrights or screenwriters, and thank God for that, because there's nothing quite like reading 20 pages of "fictional" dialogue about the death of someone's beloved sheep dog.

Here are five things to expect as a student in the creative writing program—now a major/concentration: (1) Bad writing. (2) Teachers who are, first and foremost, writers themselves. Some of them are decent, but "those who can't do, teach" is a good rule of thumb. They have one objective only: paying the bills. Some will write detailed comments on your work, and once in a while their feedback might even be coherent and helpful, but for the most part, the graduated grad student sitting at the head of the table does not care about you or your bad writing.

He is too busy being bitter about his first book, which went straight to remainders, and his MFA, which—surprise, surprise—is the most useless degree of them all. (3) Outraged students who don't understand why no one can see the brilliance in their bad writing. (4) "Hills Like White Elephants" by Hemingway. In every class. Every single class. It's a great story; we get it, and we never want to read it again. (5) Bad writing. Very, very bad writing.

Computer Science

You walk into Advanced Programming on the first day and you find a half-empty room. The students that did bother to show up are in it for the free wireless, already actively engaged in leveraging competing job offers from Wall Street firms and scary overseas conglomerates.You shuffle into the back row for a lecture recapping the very topic that got you expelled from high school—when you were twelve. You can't hear yourself think over cell phone chatter and the clacking of keys on E-Trade, the Merrill Lynch website, and CareerTrak.

You should have known something was wrong when you found out that the class met in Hamilton. You're a long way from the Gateway Lab. The comfort of painted cinderblock and linoleum tile are a distant memory.

At some point between long, unkempt beards and the development of the DVD burner, computer science turned its back on nerdiness and became the engineer's Investment Banking major in all but name. These slick, pocket-protector-less yuppies-in-training do not play Dungeons and Dragons; they wear Brooks Brothers suits and spend more time in job interviews than in class.

Those of us who grew up thinking of programming as the domain of an elite community of social outcasts were, in hindsight, idiots. The modern computer scientist isn't a hacker, or outsourced to India—more likely, he bought and sold you six times this morning and didn't even get out of bed to do it. His PC did it for him when the Nikkei opened at 4 a.m.

East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALAC)

At Columbia, you can major in many languages: French, German, even Yiddish. But woe betide the eager beaver who chooses a little-known world language like Chinese—these bits of esoterica fall under the auspices of EALAC. If your destiny lies here, you will soon discover it to be an ill-assembled grab-bag of disciplines vaguely pointing—you guessed it—East.

Language? Check. You must take three years of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, which will just about get you through a language textbook, or a dinner menu. Disciplinary focus? Check. Choose from topics you didn't want to major in like religion, political science, or economics, and learn how they relate to East Asia. Thesis? Check. It's required, and due months before those of other majors. Disquisitions on the hegemonic, phallocentric discourse of post-industrial Japanese gender identities? Double-check. Get used to this stuff, because you're going cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary whether you like it or not. You might just want to major in Chinese, but for once, the Orient is actually going to give you more than you bargained for.

Music

You've declared yourself a music major, have you? I guess that means one of three things: (1) You weren't quite good enough to get into conservatory, but your musical ego wouldn't admit defeat. (2) You actually did get into conservatory but turned them down because your academic ego wouldn't admit defeat. (3) You're one of the elite(ist) Columbia-Juilliard joint-degree students who likes stroking both egos at once. In any event, welcome to the madness.

As a music major you'll be spending a lot of time in Dodge Hall, one of Columbia's most colorful, dysfunctional locales. The entrance is located in the coldest wind-tunnel on campus, but despite the harsh winter weather, there are always three or four music/film grad students in thick-rimmed glasses smoking unfiltered cigarettes outside the door. You'll have every class in the same shitty classroom on the sixth floor, but keep clear of the office at the end of the hall—sleeping monsters dwell within. The powers-that-be guard the key-codes to all the classrooms ruthlessly, so you'll have to find your own devious ways to acquire them if you want a decent space to practice or rehearse. But that's okay—there's no performance requirement. You're not here to play music. You're here to theorize about it.

In which an anonymous Bwog contributor tells us what else happened the evening of October 4th.

As protestors marched around Lerner Hall last Wednesday evening, a very different showdown was taking shape across campus in Schermerhorn Hall. The Art History Underground, Columbia's nascent (and, judging by their president's introduction, quite enthusiastic) art history club had invited four of the department's biggest guns to square off over the question "What Is Art History?" in a roundtable discussion moderated by Gothic architecture professor Stephen Murray.

Murray, a specialist in the use of digital media in art historical research (he's responsible for the dramatic — some students sporting a hangover have claimed vomit-inducing — 360º views of Amiens Cathedral in Art Humanities, beseeched the audience to turn the evening's festivities into electronic communication, "blogging, if you will." Stirred by his exhortations, Bwog, ever the art history fan, could not resist the will to share what transpired over the next ninety minutes.