Columbia’s proposal in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Applied Sciences NYC competition has made it onto the city’s “short list,” Engineering Student Council President Nate Levick, SEAS ’12, said.
Levick said that he received an email from SEAS Dean Feniosky Peña-Mora on Nov. 21 announcing that Columbia had advanced in the competition.
“Obviously I’d like Columbia’s proposal to be chosen,” Levick said. “But I think whatever proposal is chosen will be interesting and exciting.”
University spokesman Robert Hornsby said that the University could not comment on the evaluation process.
Last Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg said in a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that three of the seven original applicants had been cut, but backtracked the next day to say that he was unsure of how many applicants were remaining in the competition.
According to the New York Daily News, only two applicants—Amity University and a group including New York Genome Center and Mount Sinai School of Medicine—were cut, leaving Columbia, Cornell University, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, and New York University as the remaining competitors.
The official decision will be announced in January and may include more than one winner, according to the mayor’s office.
The proposal or proposals chosen by the mayor will receive $100 million to invest in the project and the use of city-owned land on Roosevelt Island or Governors Island. If chosen, Columbia is planning to utilize the funds to develop the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, which will occupy three buildings of the Manhattanville campus.
University President Lee Bollinger has cited Manhattanville’s construction readiness—other applicants will have to undergo a time-consuming city land use review process—and its proximity to the Morningside campus as advantages of Columbia’s proposal.
Reports that Bloomberg and other city officials had narrowed down the competition came on the heels of an announcement Friday that Facebook plans to open its first New York City office, an engineering center, early next year. In a press conference last month, Bloomberg said that a new applied sciences campus “has the potential to be a real economic game-changer that will create jobs immediately and for generations.”
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