Teachers’ Pet
This year’s 100 latte-lapping Columbia Publishing Course graduates have bedazzled us once again with their chronicles of caffeine-fueled overachievement. As in years past, we offer you a sneak peek at publishing’s next generation in the composite biographical sketch below (all content has been taken from actual student biographies). Columbia’s New York Career Day – when the nouveaux literati will be unleashed on Manhattan publishers – is set for Monday, Aug. 2, from 9 a.m. to noon at the Time-Warner Building. For more information, call (212) 854-1898 or email publishing@jrn.columbia.edu.
A descendant of bootleggers and sheep thieves and the youngest of eight children, Ms. Student once told her father that she wanted to be a backhoe operator. However, wishing to emulate the polymaths who taught her, she eventually sought diversity in her education, studying philosophy, poetry, neurobiology, game theory, semantic logic, and French (she also speaks fluent Spanish and broken Portuguese). After a youth misspent writing dissatisfied letters to teen magazines, she learned to intelligently critique the media and the zeitgeist behind it, earning the title “most likely to discover the meaning of life” in her high school newspaper. Though her roots go back to a commune in rural New Hampshire, where she and her family resided as practicing Buddhists, she spent summers interning at a major public relations firm, where she was ostracized as “nerdy” for reading books during her lunch break.
An independent woman with a passion for print — whether it is milk cartons or manuscripts — she has written a gothic novel about a traveling circus (while her friends watched the circus, she interviewed the elephant handler backstage), as well as articles on organic beef and dietary fiber for EatingWell magazine. After studying the Divina Commedia, this former nursery-school talent show coordinator and vitamin salesperson realized that she hated heaven and adored hell. She learned the delicate art of interpersonal relations through dealing with countless diva drag queens as co-organizer of Drag Ball, Oberlin College’s largest student event.
Before graduating, she celebrated her appreciation of Nietzsche’s philosophy and her love of hip-hop in an essay recognized for academic excellence. In her free time, she researched dolphins in New Zealand as well as the history of the fish stick for her advisor. She backpacked the Andes Mountains from Argentine Patagonia to the Colombian Caribbean and rode horses through the Inner Mongolian steppe, before setting off to work in a converted chicken coop on a Tuscan hillside. Ms. Student spent last summer interning at the Wylie Agency, where, in the midst of a love-hate relationship with the copy machine, she kept her cool with a little help from Julia Child, who once said: “Learn to handle hot things, keep your knives sharp and, above all, have fun.”
