Amita Shukla reminds us of the golden rule.

Name, School, Major, Hometown:
Amita Shukla. SEAS, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Highland Park, New Jersey.
If you’re not following the New Jersey Twitter account, you’re doing it wrong.

Claim to fame:
Being the Robin Hood of textbook PDFs. Building systems for the UN, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the ACLU. Telling everyone to change their Google Ads Settings for the sake of their data privacy!!

Where are you going?
To the park in my hometown whenever it reopens.
To Schmidt Futures on a social-impact fellowship.
To rebuild this country for the people, not for the corporations!!!
To do well, and to never lose sight of doing good.

What are 3 things you learned at Columbia and would like to share with the Class of 2024?

1. Don’t confuse your real goals with other goals that are more easily measurable. Whether or not you get a prestigious internship is clearly measurable. Whether or not you are doing good things for the world, or have quality relationships with your friends, your parents, and your relationship partners are much more difficult things to measure, and success in them is much less well defined. But they are much more important.
2. You won’t regret sincerity. Being deliberate about friendship isn’t lame, it’s practical. Setting recurring lunch dates isn’t unspontaneous, it’s reassuring. Tell your friends you care about them, often, in so many words. And make friends with security guards. Shoutout to Kevin for his book recommendations and oil of oregano. Shoutout to Sir Mike for his mixtapes.
3. Columbia is a corporation. The admin even in departments with friendly titles are here for Columbia, not for you. The people who are here for you are friends, fellow classmates, and professors. People deserve your esteem, loyalty, and dignity. Corporations don’t. Full stop.

“Back in my day…”
Midterms were postponed after the 2016 election results came out. Absolute Bagels closed down temporarily because it had a C rating and everyone including me had no hesitation at all to go back.

Favorite Columbia controversy?
“White people are the best people that ever happened to the world!” – Julian von Abele, Columbia student, 2016 registered candidate for president, author of Time and the Multiverse: Selected Writings on Novel Physical Theories.

What was your favorite class at Columbia?
Introduction to Databases, with Professor Donald Ferguson.
I TAd the same class for Professor Eugene Wu as well. Take whichever one you can.
Obviously it’s practical and marketable to be able to write SQL queries, but studying databases and information storage honestly raises some pretty interesting philosophical questions too. How do we think about organizing information? How do we find things we are looking for? What are we looking for???

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese?
A bonus fourth thing I have learned at Columbia is that if you don’t want to answer a question, you can instead just change the topic to something you are confident in and talk about that instead. This will make you appear smart, and you will still get participation points.

Whom would you like to thank?
My parents and my little sister.
My friends!!! In particular the subset of my friends who have been my roommates!!
Professors Donald Ferguson and Eugene Wu.
The dude who flips bottles on Low Steps.
The Barnard Clay Collective.
Yoga to the People (visit their 103rd St. studio! Pay-what-you-wish stress relief!).
And Ethan.

One thing to do before graduating:
Be the person in class who points out a racist remark by a classmate or the professor and challenges them on it.
Unfriend campus rapists and harassers and be honest about why.
Challenge sexist grading.
Go on the record calling out bullshit.

Some people, when they experience suffering, try to make sure that everyone else has to go through the same thing. Some people try to alleviate that suffering for others. Consciously be the second one at least once while you’re here.

Call people out when you can, and don’t hold it against yourself when you can’t.
You can’t fight every deserving fight. Doing each of the things I listed above definitely required a social sacrifice and it’s okay not to be up for it some of or even most of the time.

Any regrets?
Not actually ever getting lunch with some people.