Sessions

Alcohol and Networking

Picture it: You are at an event networking with possible colleagues and employers and there is alcohol being served. Do you drink? Do you say no? Join Alice! Health Promotion in a discussion about how to make smart, safe, and responsible decisions around alcohol use.

Chat and Chew

Join Dr. Mak for a cooking lesson featuring ingredients locally sourced here in Morningside Heights! This is a hands-on workshop has teams reverse engineering a dish! Test your culinary engineering skills and enjoy a nice snack with your classmates.

Emotional Intelligence

Social Scientists have recognized that success is strongly influenced by personal qualities such as perseverance, self-control, and the ability to work well on teams. Companies recognize that employees with high Emotional Intelligence are more resilient, flexible, and adjust easier to the fast changing dynamic of the workplace. After this class you’ll understand what it is, how to measure it, and methods to increase your EQ to accelerate career success and happiness.

Engineering Your Happiness

Happiness is in your hands! Learn more about how you can engineer your happiness through a series of exercises and experiments supported by relevant research in the field of positive psychology. This is an interactive session, requiring participants to reflect and articulate in class.

Engineer Your Positive and Productive Summer

Review the world of opportunities for this summer and leave the session with 3 concrete ideas and a plan for executing them!

Friend-to-Friend

Friend2Friend is Alice! Health Promotion's skills-based training program designed to help Columbia students effectively recognize and respond to others exhibiting indicators of distress. Students can be a helper and connect peers to resources on- and off-campus. The training is focused on understanding, re-framing, referring, and self-care.

Healthy Relationships

A healthy relationship is an important part in your life. Spend some time with Alice! Health Promotion to discuss tips and tricks to help you manage your relationships and learn about resources available on campus that can be of help.

Impact: Accountability

The goal of Impact: Accountability is to initiate campus cultural shifts in embracing humility, exercising accountability, and taking ownership of oversights by providing concrete techniques and scenarios on accountability and apologizing through experiential exercises and activities. In doing so, the facilitators also aim to highlight and recognize the spaces within the Columbia University campus culture where accountability is most needed and to ensure the impact of student actions and behaviors matches their intent.

Reducing and Managing Stress

Stress management, sleep, and nutrition are key elements of a student’s well-being. Participants will learn about why these behaviors are important, strategies for incorporating them into their lives, and resources available on campus that can provide support.

Sleep Management

Sleep is a critical factor in supporting an individual's overall well-being. Health Promotion for a discussion on the importance of sleep, barriers students face when trying to get enough quality sleep and strategies for improving sleep habits.

Stress Management

Life and school can be stressful but there are many ways to manage your stress in a positive way. Spend some time with Alice! Health Promotion to discuss tips and tricks to help you manage your stress and learn about resources available on campus that can be of help.

Time Management

Making informed choices about how to use available time can set the stage for academic success. Join us! Health Promotion in a discussion on factors that impact time-choice, managing time effectively, building a balanced schedule, and tools for overcoming procrastination.

Advanced Communications

In your Core communication session Chuck Garcia discussed and displayed the 10 Commandments of Great Communicators. In this highly interactive class, you will have an opportunity to bring that framework to life through small group exercises. You will then stand, deliver, and receive feedback as you learn to become more comfortable in the discomfort of communication skill development.

Advanced Storytelling: Owning the Stage

A single word can make an audience cry, a raised voice can make an audience clap, and a wry smile can make an audience laugh. But only when it’s the exact right move at the exact right time. We’ll learn advanced techniques for word choice, vocal tone, and body movement, with the help of scientific research and a diverse array of characters – poets, politicians, pop stars, and visionary leaders from business and engineering.

Email First Impressions

Learn to craft an email that puts your best face forward, creates genuine connection, and makes the reader open to further conversation. 

Engineering Slides for Impact

Designing slides is an art and a science. In this elective, you will learn the steps for creating simple, well-structured, and visually appealing slides for highest impact.

Framing & Persuasive Communication

Engineers and other scientists often believe it is the facts that drive persuasion. But facts by themselves, however important, are not enough. Context drives meaning. And framing is the creation of content. This elective is on ways to embed facts within frames in order to move people to feel, think, know, or do things they otherwise would not.

Formal Email Writing

Email writing is vital for successful communication in US workplaces. Participants in this session will be able to list checklists for formal e-mail writing and analyze the rhetorical structure of e-mails in workplaces. The practice and awareness will help people be prepared for effective communications.

Making Small Talk

In classrooms and workplaces, you encounter many opportunities for discussion and conversation. In this session, you will be able to develop the skills of engaging in conversation appropriately, arguing effectively, and telling your thoughts clearly. You will discuss the cultural differences in discussion and conversation to engage in small talks actively in the US.

Paraphrasing and Citation

You want to cite good sources but do not know how to use the sources effectively? In this session, you will practice some paraphrasing skills to cite sources. You will learn the cultural differences in understanding paraphrasing and citation use. You will be able to list paraphrasing techniques, apply the skills to citing sources. Also, you will learn how to use in-text citation, direct quotation, and reference with following the US citation conventions.

Powerful Presentations

Powerful, persuasive presentation is a valuable and often required skill in the business world, as well as in the classroom. This dynamic and highly participatory seminar will increase your confidence and comfort level, as well as provide guidance on: Organizing content; Engaging and reading an audience; Effective non­verbal behaviors; The program will provide specific, effective techniques and strategies to use in any public speaking situation.

Public Speaking Anxiety Strategies

In this session, participants will learn how to cope with their speaking anxiety or stage fright. By understanding the nature of anxiety and developing their own coping strategies, people could become confident in public speaking settings and show their full ability with fewer language barriers. The session provides helpful advice on coping strategies and setting mindsets.

The Shape of Successful Storytelling

Effective content can inform people, but it takes an effective story to inspire people. Storytelling has been a defining feature of the human experience since prehistory, but the skill of storytelling is often lost in a modern world full of complex organizations and technical concepts. The most successful stories have in common their clear structure, disciplined order, and compelling rhythm. We’ll learn how to combine those elements into a single shape that can make any idea – from a project proposal to an employment application – irresistible.

Charcuterie and Cheese - How to Entertain and Impress

In this course, we will be learning about the history of Charcuterie. Not only will we learn about it, each student gets to join a team to create their own Charcuterie board!

Columbia and You

You are part of a great Columbia tradition! Learn more about this place we call home from inception to present day. 

Criminal Minds: Cyber and Phone Scams!

Our colleagues in Public Safety are going to talk about ways to protect yourself from crime, physically and virtually. We will cover cyber scams, street smarts, and the best ways to keep yourself safe in any environment.

Elevating Multicultural Competence

One challenge international students face is how to develop a career in a country and culture outside of their own. The seminar will help you build confidence and competitive advantage through providing practical techniques in: – Managing culture shock (a set of stress related reactions in contact with an unfamiliar culture) – Adaptation in professional settings, while maintaining cultural authenticity Developing multicultural competence

Financial Wellness and You

In this presentation, Financial Literacy topics, resources, and tools will be presented to assist attendees in better understanding the skills needed to endeavor toward Financial Wellness; a state of well-being surrounding individual financial affairs. Topics presented include: Effective Budgeting, Understanding Credit, Retirement Planning, Student Loan Indebtedness, and Financial Literacy Tools (including iGrad - a free, web-based Financial Literacy platform that provides personalized financial wellness education and loan management resources to which Columbia University students have lifetime access).

Life After F1

Come join us for an informative session on your F-1 status on what to expect after you graduate and while on OPT. Life After F-1 (or J-1) will provide detailed overview of the transition to H-1B non-immigrant category. Other non-immigrant categories can also be discussed, if there is time and interest.

The First 30 Days

Having been an HR Management Consultant, Gabby Lilienthal shares what she learned about making an impact in the first 30 days of any new job, opportunity, experience, team, etc. Join us to talk about tips for building trust and creating a consistent brand so that you can be set up for success moving forward!

What Did I Just Sign? The U.S. Legal System and working in the U.S.

Introduction to U.S. legal system and Contracts Basics of the U.S. legal system U.S. Constitution and separation of powers Contract law (including employment contracts, non-competes, non-disclosure agreements, employment at-will, etc.) Litigation/dispute process (including lawsuits, arbitration, mediation, settlement, etc.) Other important areas you need to know (immigration, employment discrimination, etc.) When do I need a lawyer and why?

Wine 101

Wines may be present in many professional situations, and having some baseline knowledge is helpful. The focus of these sessions will be on the education and culture of wines. Some sampling will be available for those interested and 21 years of age or older. 

Art of the Interview

A well-written resume, appropriate experience, and /or a personal referral will often get you in the door, but they won't necessarily get you the job. Effective, well-prepared communication and a compelling conversational style are more necessary than ever to distinguish you as a top candidate and differentiate you from the competition.

How to Prepare for a Career in Data after Graduating

Data careers have been the fastest growing sector for the past few years running. How can you as a young graduate navigate the confusing landscape that surrounding securing a job in data? This session will attempt to break down this problem and provide you with some useful tools and tips to prepare you for a great career in data.

HR Tales From The Other Side of the Table

In this session, we cover best practices for interacting during any type of interview - before, during, and after. At the end of the session, you will have tools to improve your interview responses and make more impact with the small gestures that are a part of the hiring process!

Natural Networking

Natural networking is an effective way to help you find more connections and opportunities in a thoughtful and genuine way. Take the chance to learn it and expand your possibilities through people!

Tackling a Programming Interview

Gearing up for your first programming interview? Not sure what to expect? Join us in this PDL as we cover the “need to haves” and “nice to haves” in tech interviews.

Advanced Ethics

We will be exploring some of the ethical challenges engineers face in the industry. This interactive session will feature an extended case study of the design and construction of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig, focusing on engineering decisions that compromised safety for cost savings that led to both fatalities to one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.

Human Centered Design and Innovation

We will discuss: the strategies and technologies of global manufacturing and service enterprises, connections between the needs of a global enterprise, the technology and methodology needed for manufacturing and product development, and strategic planning as currently practiced in industry.

Leadership in Crisis

This session will focus on the ways to think clearly and make smart decisions when both personal and institutional trust are at risk. We will cover: The drivers of trust; How to deal with failures, accidents, protests, and other difficult incidents or events; How to manage effectively and engage those who matter in ways that maintain trust.

Leadership, Followership, and Teamwork

Learn when and how to be the leader, follower and team player.

The Bedrock of Cloudproc: PySpark On Google Cloud Platform

This lecture will introduce the cloud PySpark/Hadoop offering from Google Cloud Platform and several best practices for its use. Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of SQL, Basic knowledge of Python, a well charged laptop

BigQuery: A Tour Of The GCP Data Warehouse

Analyzing data from several disparate locations is a common challenge in business and a Data Warehouse is a great solution. This course will cover de-normalizing data from several different locations and then performing analysis on that data with Google Cloud Platform’s data warehouse product, BigQuery.

Cryptography: One Bit at a Time

Cryptography surrounds us. Every time we access an “https” website, we are using incredibly powerful cryptographic tools. This class will take a high-level look at what tools we have at our disposal to keep our communications secure. We will also take a deeper look at asymmetric key cryptography.

Data Visualization

The final step of any analysis is presenting the result concisely and effectively. This session will cover principles of data visualization and how to build a story with data.

Deployments: Getting Your Product To The People

In this session, we will cover the topic of deployment, how its different than local development, and a few platforms provided by GCP for publishing your code to the would. Those platforms include, VMs, App Engine, and Kubernetes. Students should come with a well charged laptop.

Django: Python and the Web

Django and Flask have become the predominate Python web frameworks available today. In this class, we will set up our own Django web application in order to pull apart and analyze each piece in the framework's stack.

My First Server on Amazon Web Services

In this session, we will sign up for a free AWS account and walk through the steps of setting up our own server. By the end of class, students will be able to set up, provision, and tear down their own virtual resources. Prerequisites: a well-charged laptop, Bash, Linux, And SSH and Get Git [+ GitHub] are suggested.

NoSQL, No Problem: A Beginners Look At MongoDB and Cassandra

This session covers two of the dominant non-relational databases in industry; MongoDB and Cassandra. Both are Not-Only-SQL (NoSQL) databases but each approaches the challenge of coordinating data storage differently. These differences as well as an introduction to the technical use of each database will be presented. Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of SQL, a well charged laptop.

Text, Plain Text and The Text Editor Vim

The computer program "vim" is a text editor invented over 30 years ago, yet still in wide use today in various forms. We'll discuss just what it means to be a "plain" text editor, how plain text differs from that which you'd see in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, why such a simple old program like vim still has much to offer, and how one can learn to use it for day to day productivity.