Who needs Silicon Valley anyway?

Columbia University isn’t just for the technologically minded. But it’s the best place for techies with their eye on changing the world.

When you think of technology, the first place that comes to mind is often not New York City, but Silicon Valley, where I worked this summer. After my first week there, I could think of no better place for me. In that first week, I walked into Mountain View with a stupid smile, expecting to run into Sergey and Larry, the creators of Google. Not finding them on the street, I walked onto Google’s campus to find towering buildings and bucolic parks. I wasn’t allowed in. Needless to say, I never met either of Google’s founders. That didn’t matter, though. The weather was great. The people were all friendly. Everybody seemed to work in technology. I walked home giddy.

By the time I left Silicon Valley, though, the pleasantries became wearisome. While the technology was certainly impressive, it seemed that there was little else to this place. The weather never got too hot or too cold, the people never got neurotic, and the nightlife was nonexistent. And with everyone working in technology, there seemed to be little hope of making much noise with new ideas.

In contrast, Columbia students seem to pursue a broader palate of interests without the intense focus on a singular subject. But there’s room for the technologically minded here. If one yearns for the pleasant weather year-round, he can stay in the Columbia Computer Science Lab and Interactive Classroom in Fairchild. To interact solely with pleasant people, he can hang around at any of the Association for Computing Machinery’s copious social events. If he wants to program day and night with new projects, he can join the Application Development Initiative and join others doing so, too. In a way, Silicon Valley exists in microcosm on Columbia’s campus.

What differs most from Silicon Valley is that Columbia’s leaders concentrate not on computing alone, but on building bridges between computing and other disciplines. Take for example Dr. David E. Shaw, who will be lecturing here at an ACM event in the Spring. A former faculty member of our computer science department and currently chief scientist at D.E. Shaw Research, Dr. Shaw began as a computer scientist and ultimately went on to make his mark in both finance and in bioinformatics. His efforts in finance led to the creation of a globally competitive hedge fund, and his bioinformatics work led to the formation of the world’s fastest supercomputer for proteinomics. With the concentration of people and ideas on campus and in New York City, it is no wonder that such impressive advances can be found in this location.

The isolated environment of Silicon Valley might be perfect for some, but to find new areas of innovation and development, there is no place better than Columbia University in New York City. We change almost too much. Deans and state governors move in and out like seasons. We’re also an adaptive bunch, and that change is fuel for the fire. It doesn’t hurt that New York City’s roots run deep throughout the political, economic, and cultural worlds—home to the United Nations headquarters and Wall Street as well as Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For the computing community, opportunities for technological improvement abound.

Most people at Columbia would not consider getting involved in technology, something considered foreign by some people and stigmatized as the plaything of geeks. But, for a field that affects almost all areas of campus and academic life, that view can only be described as narrow-minded. Ambitious student designers on campus have been improving the student experience for years already with sites like CULPA, Columbia Classes, WikiCU, Bwog, loveatcu, and columbiaspectator.com. Opportunities for the tech-minded outside of the gates at 116th are similarly impressive. We have an incredible biomedical informatics department at our medical center, bringing technological improvements to healthcare and medicine. Financial companies like BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase recruit heavily from among the technologically minded Columbians to work on their trading algorithms. Academic research in all fields relies heavily on program design.

Silicon Valley might be the center of the tech world, but New York City is the center of everything else. Innovation in technology is important, but so is the opportunity to extend that technology to other facets of life. With its diversity in thought and background, Columbia’s student population is best positioned to expand to those areas of life without missing out on what makes Silicon Valley so impressive.

Akiva Bamberger is a Columbia College junior majoring in computer science and mathematics with a pre-medical concentration. He is president of the Association for Computing Machinery. Bits and Pieces runs alternate Wednesdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com