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More than 200 guests joined the United States Military Veterans of Columbia University to celebrate the inauguration of the Yellow Ribbon Program.
The Columbia Alumni Association (CAA) had its annual U.S. Open event on Wednesday, September 2 and, as with the CAA Picnic last July, GS alumni played a vital role in the day’s programming, with their own reserved table where they congregated before the matches.
Beginning Aug. 1, Columbia University School of General Studies, founded in 1947 in response to GIs returning from World War II, will be one of 15 schools at Columbia University slated to participate in the Yellow Ribbon GI Education Enhancement Program, part of the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008.
Born in Haiti and raised in Harlem, Rene Aubry has long been interested in "the different ways people could live, simply because of the different places they may have been born," he said.
In April, filmmaker Shawn Atkins was named a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow; the fellowship will support her work on The Broken Teacup, an adaptation of some of Franz Kafka’s short stories. Atkins also runs The House of Frame by Frame Fierce, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to using animation as a form of artistic activism for at-risk youth.
Military veterans have been members of Columbia’s nontraditional student body for over a century. Doughboys returning from Europe, along with civilians who had been involved in the war effort at home, swelled the ranks of Extension Teaching (as the school was then known) after World War I from 7,000 students in 1918 to 17,000 by 1923.
Dean Awn is passionate about making GS a place for students who have found their way to school despite sometimes very challenging odds, and his primary focus in his ten years as dean has been to integrate GS courses with the rest of Columbia’s undergraduates.
Howard Grossman’s first job wasn’t exactly easy. “It was soul-destroying,” he says of his residency at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, where in the 1980s he saw some of the earliest AIDS patients. Grossman graduated from GS’s Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program in 1977, attended medical school at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and was immediately thrust into the national epidemic.
Columbia University entered the modern world in 1830 with the institution of the Literary and Scientific Course, a track of instruction that eschewed Latin and Greek for the sciences and modern languages. The series of courses was open to all Columbia College students (roughly 120 in total)—but also to young men working in “mercantile and industrial establishments,” the University’s first part-time students.
Columbia’s response to World War I—and, three decades later, World War II—helped lay the foundation for the modern University. The first Core Curriculum course, Contemporary Civilization, began in the fall of 1918 as “War Aims,” a current-events class for SATC members. The aftermath of World War II brought not only Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to Morningside Heights, but also the GI Bill®, a financial blessing for the University, which was still reeling from the Depression.
Columbia University School of General Studies (GS) is pleased to announce a 17% increase in its financial aid program. Beginning in the 2008-2009 academic year, this enhancement in aid will be focused on continuing students who have the highest demonstrated economic need and substantial loan debt. Amounting to slightly more than one million dollars in additional scholarship assistance, the increase will affect approximately 50% of GS undergraduate degree students who currently receive institutional financial aid.
Long Island City resident, Postbac Premed student, and classical violinist Benjamin Robison was granted a $72,000 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Knowledge Networking Award for developing Fractor: Act on Facts, a web application that matches news stories with opportunities for social activism and community service.
Over the past ten years, the School of General Studies Student Council has evolved from a small student governing group into an active organization of passionate students focused on community building and campus-wide integration. Achieving greater campus-wide integration has been challenging, but because of previous visionary GSSC leaders, today’s students have a greater sense of community and more opportunities than ever before.
Social gatherings are more than often fraught with cheerful greetings and ice-breaking questions such as: "What do you do?" or "Where do you work?" Gillian Hollenberg '94, known to her GS brethren as Gillian Wachsman, sampled many professions before choosing one tried and true: homemaker, or, to be politically correct, domestic engineer.
Peter Awn, Dean of the School of General Studies (GS), awarded the School's Medal of Distinction to Roger Pilon '71GS, a Constitutional scholar who is the vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute.