This week in ESC, they talked to the Director of Academic Integrity Victoria Brown and discuss concerns they have with CCE. ESC Bureau Chief Lori Luo reports.

Academic Integrity
The main order of business was a call via Zoom with Victoria Brown, the Director for Academic Integrity for SEAS and CC. This is going to be her second year in the position, and she spoke to ESC a year ago as well with the goal of preventative education. This year, she’s primarily working with the Academic Affairs Representative James Wang to create initiatives.

Among the things she wanted to highlight in her discussion with ESC were recent events. Along with Wang, Brown has planned events such as a tabling event to get students to talk to other students about the academic integrity values at Columbia and to promote resources for academic support such as tutoring. Brown said that she and the Academic Integrity staff generally aims to plan these events around midterms and finals to remind students of the academic policy as they’re taking exams.

As we’re in the middle of midterm season now, Brown wanted to highlight a couple of events she felt would be useful for ESC. First, for first year students, there will be a P3 Pop Up Event in Lerner 501 this Friday. The Academic Integrity team is also running a Core bookmark contest for quotes that represent Academic Integrity. Students who win will create their own bookmarks that will be distributed around campus through Butler and the other libraries. Next semester, Brown is also planning the first ever Academic Integrity Awareness Week, currently slated for the third week in February, and she wanted both ESC support as well as ideas for ways to publish and promote information regarding the week.

She also brought up initiatives that she’s put into place, specifically an orientation event about Academic Integrity that began with the current sophomores (Class of 2022) that has led to an increased awareness of the “Wear the Crown with Honor” idea. Similarly, the Class of 2023 and new 3-2s and transfer students on campus were the first class to receive an online training on Courseworks over the summer regarding Academic Integrity.

Brown also fielded questions from ESC, but there weren’t too many questions. Only Class of 2023 President Avi Gupta asked for more info regarding the P3 Pop Up Event as he felt it would be of interest to the Class of 2023. Brown went into more detail about the event, saying that there would be writing center consultants present, and that in a trail run of the event earlier this spring, she liked that it was able to get more first year students to be more open about going to the Writing Center. This was done by getting Writing Center consultants out of Philosophy, which was intimidating for first years, and into Lerner.

Brown closed out the call by emphasizing that she wanted to support whatever ESC needed and that she was excited for future collaboration!

Issues with CCE
Similar to last week when Student Body President Alina Ying asked ESC for concerns they had about Departmental Advising, this week Ying asked ESC about their experiences with CCE. Specifically, she wanted to know about how people felt about the online appointment scheduling system as well as just general concerns.

The first issue that was brought up was that CCE ought to try to get companies to have longer offer deadlines as other schools, such as Stanford, have firm positions on offer deadlines. Ying responded in that ESC has discussed it before with CCE, but as many firms already do not go through CCE, they are reluctant to do so. It would also be a difficult task that they aren’t sure would be successful.

The other, more expansive, issue with CCE presented were that they did not have the expertise necessary to inform students about Engineering opportunities. This was a viewpoint echoed by many members of ESC; one specifically noted that during a meeting, the counselor only suggested the students use Google and Handshake to look for opportunities. Class of 2021 Class President Kalisa Ndamage noted that CCE was very good for certain areas such as finance, but they have no clue what to do with engineering. Vice President of Policy Estevan Mesa said that regarding this issue, it was related to the Co-op initiative that he is working on with Ndamage as it would be a way to force SEAS to make connections with employers. This way, maybe they would be able to give more informed answers.

Another one of the issues was the difficulty to get appointments with CCE as well as the difficulty of having to see different counselors each time, leading to contradicting advice from different counselors sometimes. A member of ESC brought up CSA’s appointed advisor system as a potential way to remedy the issue, specifically with major specific recommendations. Vice President of Student Life Bret Silverstein echoed this recommendation. Silverstein felt that having specific experts for specific industries would be good such that you could go back multiple times and build a relationship with them. This solution would also solve the issue of having to repeatedly explain what you’d like to do within the span of the short 30 minutes per appointment.

Miscellaneous Updates

  • Vice President of Finance Sophia Sagandyk’s metrocard initiative has closed for submissions. She aims to distribute the cards the week after Thanksgiving Break.
  • Tree Lighting will be Dec 5 from 6 to 7 PM. ESC will be giving out a thousand T-shirts, donuts and hot chocolate.
  • Professional Development Representative Sebastian Sanchez is working on getting a similar program to the Odyssey Mentoring Program that CC has set up in SEAS. He is more interested in why SEAS doesn’t have something like that, which he will bring up with CCE.
  • There is only one more ESC general body meeting left! It will take place next week (November 25th) in their usual room Lerner Satow at 9:30 PM. If you intend to attend, I welcome you to join me in the viewer’s section!

Academic Integrity reminders via Flickr