Name, school: Mke Kennelly, Columbia College. I lost the “i” in my first name during high school, and no one here can help me find it…

Claim to fame: I wear a ratty old Montreal Expos hat, which is a great conversation starter…with creepy old men in bars. It’s fascinating how many people think it’s awesome you wear an Expos hat. Even in Europe, people would talk to me about it. And assume I spoke French. I don’t.

Where are you going? I am finishing a research project on 10 Dimensional Calabi-Yau Manifolds as candidates for Compactification Spaces in certain Superstring Theories. I’m also working for the World Science Festival. Once I’m done with that…uh…yeah…I dunno.

Three things you learned at Columbia:

1) Have more than one group of core friends. I hang out with Theatre Kids a lot. But I there’s a group of guys I’ve known since freshman year that are into totally different things. Like, they know what the infield fly rule is. It’s nice to have different types of people you feel you can count on.

2) Students know when a professor cares about a class and when they’re just teaching because they’re obliged to contractually. And they will attend classes accordingly. If your professor doesn’t care, stop going to that class. You won’t get anything out of it and you’ll still pass. There are better uses for those hour and fifteen minutes.

3) If your professor does care, enjoy the shit out of that class, because that professor will probably leave Columbia for greener pastures. If not, they’re probably enduring the constant ridicule of their peers mentioned above because they actually care about teaching.

“Back in my day…” People didn’t do their Lit Hum reading, wrote their Lens Essays at the last minute, and thought Frontiers was stupid. The more things change…

Justify your existence in 30 words or fewer: I’ve been inside the Large Hadron Collider. While drunk on cheap red wine.

Is the War on Fun over? Who won? Any war stories? Yeah, don’t know anything about this “War on Fun”. It always seemed more like the “Minor Skirmish on Fun” to me.

That said, I started a fight at La Negrita/999/NoCo after LateNite once. There was this creepy guy taking pictures of some of the girls in the cast, so I went up to him and told him to put his camera away. And then everybody in the bar tried to kick my ass. Apparently I really dodged a bullet.

Get a fake and go do things off campus.

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? The lead singer in my band is deathly allergic to all milk products. But she can have oral sex. And her life sucks.

Advice for the class of 2015:

I’m going to echo my friend Alice Mottola’s advice, and say just perform something. The winter break of my sophomore year I wrote this song about a girl I liked, and about quantum physics. And I got a bunch of people together and played it at Earl Jam. It was the first time I’d preformed in front of people since the fifth grade.

Since then, I helped form a band that’s played all over the city, have written three short shows that were put up on campus, and been in countless others productions. Or, I can count them…9. I think. It was the best part of my college experience.

There are so many opportunities to express yourself artistically at Columbia, and they’re all run by great people. Even the ones where I hate the people running them are run by great people. Take advantage of them. Because once you leave here, people are gonna start telling you that your art sucks and it isn’t gonna pay the bills. Which is completely true. It does suck and it isn’t gonna pay the bills.

But don’t let that stop you.

Also, if you want to do anything in the STEM fields, start doing research as soon as possible. You’ll form much stronger bonds with a research advisor than a classroom professor, and you’ll learn infinitely more. That A+ in your ODE class don’t mean anything.

Any regrets? Ray Davies, frontman of The Kinks, once said, “If I had to do my life over, I would change every single thing I have done.” It’s not worth having regrets. But if you had the chance to do it all over, why would you do anything the same?

But I’d use fewer ellipses…