93 CommentsEarthshaking news, people: “SEAS” will no longer be called “SEAS.” Instead, as of Fall 2011, it will be “CE” for “Columbia Engineering.” Yes, gone are the days of probing your new NSOP buddy with the pleasingly assonant phrase, “CC or SEAS?”
The Student Affairs Orientation page reads:
The first newsletter to Columbia College (CC) and Columbia Engineering (CE) First Years is now available.
That newsletter reads:
Dear parents and families of the Columbia College and Columbia Engineering Class of 2015,
On behalf of the Division of Student Affairs, it is an honor to welcome you and your family into our Columbia family. I invite you to join us at our June Summer Advising events and I look forward to meeting you during Family Orientation and Family Weekend in the fall. If I can be of any assistance to you, do not hesitate contact me.
Regards,
Matthew Patashnick
Director of Parent and Family Programs
According to one Bwogger, Peña-Mora spoke at an ESC meeting about the superiority of “CE” over “SEAS” because of its inclusion of “Columbia” and its two letter acronym to match the other undergraduate schools. Perhaps that’s why CE changed its name to PAX?
So, basically, the administration did it without your approval and without transparency. SEAS-kids, or should we say “CE students,” we’re sorry. We’re probably going to continue to call it SEAS, and judging by the lack of widespread official notice of the change, so will everyone else.
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93 Comments
@tradition starter Well now SEAS guys can be “CE-men.” Like semen. Who’s with me?
@Anonymous don’t be such a CC
@CC '15 I’ve never known CE as SEAS. MEH
@C '15 ^^Or should I say^^
@CC '15 Speak for yourself.
@Big Brother Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Eurasia is an ally…
@If some one gave me free gin then I would cry and call it victory as well. Now its time to go to joes and pretend like there is no truth in my statement but only a dry wit. Dry like vermouth.
@Anonymous People here care way too much about name over substance… if only I went to another place like Harvard. Oh, wait…
@Anonymous No OH MY GOD NO
@What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
@anyone notice the latest email from the registrar’s office still refers to us as “SEAS students” … SEAS lives on!
@SEAS, CE.... same shit, you’re still taking the same classes and graduating with a solid engineering background, so who the fuck cares.
@Because its not about the education, its about the name we put on afterwords. Do you even go here?
@... it’s true.
if columbia undergraduate education was a car, it would be a delorean. flashy, funky looking, not terribly functional, lazily designed and poorly constructed, yet stuffed to the gills with cocaine.
@most importantly... …it would be able to go BACK TO THE FUTURE!!
@... it is able to go back to the future, and it does. trust me my friend, it does.
@Homeless Engineer ABET accreditation? Where we’re going, we don’t need… ABET accreditation.
@hmmm I believe that would be *afterward my fellow Columbian.
@hahahahaha oh man. laughed so hard at this. glad to know where YOUR head’s at
@Anonymous i heard a while back that they were considering a name change partly in reaction to the whole new-engineering-school-in-nyc thing that happened earlier this year. apparently, people were saying “there’s no engineering school in new york” and now stanford may get an engineering campus on governor’s island. the name change from SEAS to CE seems to be (like someone alluded to above) an effort to [re]assert SEAS’s presence in NYC and worldwide as an excellent engineering school.
@hmmm That line of thought makes some sense. Sadly it was no uneducated layman but Mayor Bloomberg, quite a well-trained engineer himself, who I believe initiated that strain of thought this year, saying not that there isn’t an engineering school in NYC, but that there isn’t a “really great” one or something to that effect. Could his opinion be right?
@hmmm (To clarify, it’s the rationale behind changing the name of the school that I think makes some sense– not the idea that it isn’t “really great.” I lazily used “that line of thought” to refer to two thoughts).
@? Cooper Union doesn’t count? :(
@well the truth is, even if mayor bloomberg did know about seas, nyu poly, cooper union, etc, he clearly hit a sensitive zone because it seems that everyone at CE, or nyu poly, or whatever other engineering schools exist in nyc happens to find their way into finance or consulting or something non-engineer-y.
i think the mayor just wants to diversify the talent pool in nyc, or at least the perception of it, by refocusing efforts in getting business to hire engineers to be engineers in nyc–the financial meltdown must have taken years off his life, and perhaps he sees traditional engineering as being more stable and important to an economy.
the underlying premises here are false because it may be the case that certain types finance and consulting help stimulate great engineering projects. or it may be the case that new engineering doesn’t matter in new york because nothing will ever be made again the same as in the 60’s in new york the same way nothing will ever be made again the same as in the 60’s in the USA. or it may be the case that silicon valley did not grow because of stanford or berkeley but because of a gold rush phenomenon.
however the mayor may have his reasons–hey, if you had the chance to import a gucci to compete with chanel on 5th ave there’s always a neighborhood dynamic that attracts attention. after all, what has dartmouth’s lone voice in the woods ever done for them?
@Anonymous Because a huge number of SEAS graduates go into finance.
That’s why there’s “no good engineering school in nyc”.
Because finance EATS YOUR SOUL.
ahem.
@Anonymous thanks ESC for letting us know!
@You know I’ve known about this for a few months now. It has been in the works for a while, and just because Bwog sucks at finding things out until other people report them doesn’t mean it came out of nowhere. Stop blaming the administration for your apathy.
@wtf? whether it was announced a year ago or yesterday, it’s still the administration that’s changing the name, not bwog. why shouldn’t we be mad at them?
@Anonymous i look forward to the day when there is no barnard, GS, SEAS or college. there is only one undergraduate body like our peers at other top schools.
well i can dream
@hmmm Of the top schools that come to my mind, at least several have different undergraduate divisions. Penn has Wharton of course in addition to its very own SEAS, Harvard has a well-known and much derided “extension school” in addition to the College, and Cornell of course has an agricultural school that of all “indignities” is part of the New York State public university system. And I for one think that having different undergraduate academic divisions makes sense in certain cases and serves meritorious educational goals– when the different divisions serve purposes of educational merit. Having a separate engineering school allows Columbia to attract academically capable students with aptitudes for increasingly important disciplines that it would otherwise lose, while likely increasing and not decreasing the rigor of their academic program, for which the full humanities-focused core of the College would be a distraction. Having a school of “general studies” provides students with demonstrated academic potential but oftentimes deficient academic records an unprecedented second chance at experiencing the rigor of a prestigious education– among them hometown community college graduates and high school dropouts with some of the more remarkable stories of personal advancement and self-improvement of any members of the student body. And of course having such a school also provides a measure of community to other somewhat older students who by virtue of experience and maturity wouldn’t perhaps fit quite as well in the dorm life of John Jay or Carmen, among them students pursuing second undergrad degrees and a growing number of veterans. Both of these divisions expand the undergraduate community in ways that would not be possible under the framework of the College, absent alterations to the College’s unique academic character. That’s all I’m going to say…
@GS You do realize that GS takes in 500 students a year right?
GS is bigger than SEAS…I’m not even sure how that works out
@Anonymous CE is Civil Engineering in SEAS
@Anonymous CC is Contemporary Civilizations in CC
@Anonymous These are facts.
@civil engineering grad CIEN is civil engineering in SEAS
@marc I guess in 3 years when Bwog asks me for senior wisdom, I will have an answer to the “Back in my day…” question.
@Your boss Get back to work, you damn unpaid intern!
@Someone posted this last summer and I laughed just as hard.
@Alum admissions has been calling it columbia engineering for years. it is better branding. a lot of schools have SEAS, plus it is a mouthful to say.
it doesn’t prevent students from calling it SEAS, just that it creates a better branding for external audiences.
and the official acronym of SEAS in university two letter initialdom is EN. which i quite like.
@Alum and by mouthful i refer to school of engineering and applied science
@Anonymous I like this too. I hated that SEAS didn’t have the word “Columbia”. What, I’m not good enough for the Columbia?!
@WHAT ABOUT THE HISTORY??? long time no CE.
now we change?
@SEAS '09 As a SEAS alumnus, I am very upset at the Dean for rendering my old t-shirts obsolete.
@Anonymous it is still SEAS. A formal name change requires approval from the board of trustees (yes, you are unlikely to be consulted by them too).
@Alum But a nickname change doesn’t.
@ahhh What happens to “SEAS The Day”?!?!?! Does it become “CE The Day” now? Ew. That’s disgusting.
@alum They should change the name back to “School of Mines”
@Anonymous huh how is this new? Student Affairs and Admissions has been calling it Columbia Engineering (CE) before I came to Columbia
and I’ve graduated :(
@Anonymous also i always thought calling it FU FOUNDATION was pretty fucked up. None of the other ivy league engineering schools are named, especially not by someone who has no connection to Columbia. I mean, we don’t call it Kluge College do we? Yeah can’t wait till they remove that…
@Anonymous We got told this at NSOP OL training in May by accident and everyone went WTF
@CUIT Wrecking Crue http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002129121969 – be ready for the real world!
@Anonymous Would it be immoral to leave it the old way on my resume?
@omg nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
@bystander I say CE is a bad choice of acronym. In most educational institutions CE is synonymous as an acronym for Continuing Education.
@agreed agreed. CE is continuing ed and has been for a long time
http://ce.columbia.edu/
@Anonymous Yes, CE is typically used to refer to Continuing Education. Which is why Columbia already has a school called CE: Continuing Education (http://www.ce.columbia.edu).
@You mean "had" The post says it was (quietly) renamed to PAX, presumably to make way for the SEAS name change.
@Anonymous dude. satire. cmon.
@Bold claims are worth more than factual ev More than half of people who go to SEAS don’t major in ABET accredited majors.
@CC'10 This doesn’t effect me even slightly, and yet I feel a bit threatened by the idea of my Columbia world becoming obsolete.
I made fun of SEAS kids. Not CE kids
@CC' 13 and i make fun of you for your inexcusable use of “effect” in that sentence. what write do you have to make fun of SEAS kids?
@Anonymous Write? Really?
@Anonymous I think you mist the humor.
@Yeah Your such a fool
@such hippercrits these comments are just sloppy. please stop and check your grammer!
@And Please remember to Capitalize Every first letter of the sentence as well as proper nouns.
@Keep the Puns Coming Hippercrits? Don’t you mean Hipster-crits? Grammar is sooooo in right now.
@CC'10 ugh. bested by the bwog denizens – this is why I need four more years of college!
seriously kids – enjoy it
@Anonymous I’m can CE the senior wisdoms of ’12 already. “Back in my day…”
@blah blah yeah, back in my day jj and ferris didnt have a meal swipe, facilities did their job, cava was cava and seas was seas. damn im getting old.
@honestly we still call it cannons. we still call it cava. we will always call it seas.
@Woah Wait. It’s not CAVA?
@Anonymous ça va
@Anonymous no, it’s cuems
@anon Sounds like cums. I like it.
@Anonymous ….what is cannons?
@Anonymous This is some bullshit.
@phil suxx
@Feeling Unloved Does this mean Pena-Mora favors engineering majors over applied science majors?
@SEAS '11 What is this “Applied Science” of which you speak?
@Anonymous Operations Research, Computer Science, Applied Math, Applied Physics. So it’s not only a few who are being ignored with this change.
@well I kind of like this. Instead of CC or SEAS, it’s College or Engineering. You can drop the “Columbia” – it adds no information. Onwards!
@anon Wow – “college or engineering.” How lame! I vote this down. Sorry bud.
@YouShouldPayMoreAttention Hey, guy don’t worry, now we can call ourselves CE’s kids, and be grammatically correct. Everybody wins.
@PUN ME Cause we obviously can’t use “CE the day.” (wtheck would that mean anyway) Gimme your best shot, Columbia.
@Harrumph! I CE.
@SEAS '12 I’m pissed about this. The engineering school’s name is “The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science”, more commonly shortened to “The School of Engineering and Applied Science.” CC is an initialism for “Columbia College.” GS is an initialism for “General Studies.” BC is an initialism for “Barnard College.” CE is not an initialism for “The School of Engineering and Applied Science.” The correct initialism is, and always will be, SEAS and I refuse to use an incorrect acronym for Dean Peña-Mora’s supposed “inclusion” to match the other schools.
@CC'XIV GS is School of General Studies, jsyk.
@I think people will eventually CE this as a good change.
WHAT THE HELL MY CAPTCHA INCLUDES GREEK LETTERS???
@Hey Feni, FU for getting rid of SEAS!
@Everything's Changing! Everything’s changing!
@si si si si si si si si si si sennnnnorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. my name is heniffer lopez and i like tacos y burrrritooooos.
@Anonymous Jessica Lopez