spectrum: academics

Attention, Columbia students! Registration season is once again upon us, and you know what that means: Late nights scrolling through class directories, frantic messaging of wise upperclassmen for tips, and choosing classes just because they fit your schedule. Woohoo!

Cheryl? Millie? Milstein Center? The Cheryl and Philip Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning? The name of Barnard’s brand-new library has already become a topic of wide controversy, but there’s one thing we can agree on: This building is sick.

At first glance, the list of Barnard requirements may seem quite daunting. Within your four years as a Barnard student, you have to complete your first-year courses, distributional requirements, Modes of Thinking, a major, and take electives for a total of 122 points. However, it’s not nearly as bad as it may seem. To help you understand how it all works, here is a crash course on Barnard requirements.

Noise levels are scaled 1 to 5. 1 meaning you are able to hear PrezBo’s toupee hit the floor in an empty Low Library, and 5 being Baker Field during the game-winning touchdown on Homecoming.

Noise levels are scaled 1 to 5. 1 meaning you are able to hear PrezBo’s toupee hit the floor in an empty Low Library, and 5 being Baker Field during the game-winning touchdown on Homecoming.

Registration season is always a stressful time, whether that involves scrambling through Vergil to find classes, comparing professors on CULPA, or anxiously checking the classes on SSOL for enrollments and waitlists. In short, registration sucks. In April, we asked what would help make course selection smoother and easier. Well, we heard you and we made it! After a month of hard coding, the SpecTech team and Spectrum finally present Vergil+, a Google Chrome extension that makes enhances your registration experience.

It’s second semester, so hopefully (if you’re a first-year) you’ve figured out what the Core is.

This week, we are no longer free Columbians. New York has reared its slushy head after being strangled by a cold wave unlike most of us have seen in our climate change-impacted lifetimes; and once again, the line for the Hamilton elevator wraps its way around the lobby, the second floor of John Jay echoes with the coughs of whatever grippes and diseases we picked up on vacation, and a colorful flock of Canada Geese emerges from brick buildings at two-hour intervals, as we prepare ourselves to get back to the grind.

With finals come stressful group study dates, countless trips to Blue Java and Joe, and, of course, far too many late nights in the library. Unpleasant though they may be, these nights spent in the library are unavoidable, and Columbia knows that. During finals season, a number of campus libraries extend their hours so that we can spend even more time in the library—how considerate! That being said, note that some libraries on campus, such as Butler and Avery, don’t actually change their hours during reading week or finals. We’ve compiled a list of all of the finals season schedules for the major libraries on campus so you can start planning where you’ll be spending the majority of your time for the next two weeks. Happy #FinalsSzn!

Did you know that you can get money for… going to school? That’s right, you read that correctly. Like most colleges, in addition to financial aid and scholarships Columbia offers several hundred fellowships to its undergraduates.