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CCSC Combats "Study Day"

It's unofficially academic honors day on Bwog, so in a very special double-feature of Senior Wisdom, we check in with CC Salutatorian, Julia Kalow.

Name, School:

Julia Kalow, Columbia College

Claim to fame:

I'm the one you have to listen to at CC Class Day who's not Joel Klein.

Post-grad plans:

PhD in organic chemistry at Princeton.

Preferred swim test stroke?

Breast.

What are three things you learned at Columbia?

1. The academic part of college (which is all I'm qualified to talk about) is fun if you allow yourself to be a dork enough to enjoy it. Look for the things that interest you, that surprise you, that impassion you, and then have unabashedly loud and dorky arguments about them with your dorkiest friends in inappropriate places.

2. Appreciate your departmental administrative assistants. If they like you, you can get around a lot of red tape. Also, some of them will give you cookies.

3. If someone asks you a question that you can't answer, the best response is: "That would be a good thought experiment." I heard Horst Stormer use it once at a seminar, so it must work.


Via Columbia's website:

"Julia Kalow, of Newton, Mass., is majoring in chemistry and creative writing. A winner of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, she works in the lab of Professor Jim Leighton in a synthetic chemistry research group. She also is an accomplished flautist, playing with the Columbia University Wind Ensemble, and a dancer. Her interest in creative writing focuses on short prose forms and fiction. Kalow will pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry next year and intends to teach at the university level."

Kalow is also a short prose writer, and a talented one at that. You can read her work in the March issue of the Blue and White and in our upcoming April/May double-issue. And for a fun, semi-Julia Kalow-themed matching game, see our earlier post about Phi Beta Kappa.

Congrats!


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Bwog is compiled by the staff of The Blue and White, Columbia University's undergraduate magazine.

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