Ale inspires us to combat misinformation wherever we can, and to go buy some cheese from Westside.

Name, School, Major, Hometown: Ale Díaz-Pizarro, Columbia College, History & Economics, Mexico City

Claim to fame: Keeping WKCR running for four years, mostly. Doing the Saturday night opera show, working at the Writing Center, being on 4×4 Magazine, being an unofficial guide for Mexico City travel tips, and solving the New York Times crossword really fast every day.

Where are you going? Somewhere on the Amtrak Northeast Corridor line, hopefully.

What are three things you learned at Columbia and would like to share with the Class of 2029?

1. Find something that keeps you coming back to school that isn’t school itself. I came back my sophomore year more for radio than for Columbia. Find something you love, and love it deeply, and grab it with both hands.
2. It’s cool to care. The least interesting people I met at Columbia were the most nonchalant. Caring about your academics, your friends, your clubs, your peers, your values makes college more rewarding, and it’s a crucial first step in building community. On the flipside, you have to know when to care and when not to: if you don’t already believe that “done is better than perfect,” you’ll find out the hard way—I certainly did.
3. The best bars are not the most popular bars. Find your favorite spots yourself.

“Back in my day…” John Jay had hot pastrami sandwiches for dinner, and they were good. Also, Ferris had cheesecake every day, multiple kinds.

Favorite Columbia lore? In 1958, before the Cuban Revolution, a young upstart by the name of Fidel Castro went on WKCR for an interview. The year before, WKCR was the first North American radio station to broadcast the signal from Sputnik; the morning after the broadcast, the FBI walked into the station and seized the tape, which they destroyed in 1975. (Least favorite lore: the “WKCR hijacking” of 1995—it was just a new music program! Nothing got hijacked! Stop contacting us about it! Yet the Wikipedia talk page editors refuse to let me make the truth known to the people… their days until my “conflict of interest” expires are numbered.)

What was your favorite class at Columbia? I feel like writing two theses entitles me to two answers—though choosing only two is hard. For Economics, “Political Economy” with Alessandra Cassella is by far the best class offered by the department: my thinking has never been sharper than it was that semester, and Cassella is a fantastic professor and an even better human. For History, I recommend Carl Wennerlind’s “History of Capitalism” every semester; it’s the class that made me be a history major, and the rigor of readings and assignments prepared me for my upperclassman years. I should say these aren’t easy classes, but an earned A is so much more rewarding than an easy one (and if you’re at Columbia for an easy A, I don’t know what to tell you).

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? Oral sex and it’s not even remotely close. Have you ever been in the cheese aisle at Westside?

Whom would you like to thank? My friends, my professors, my family, whoever nominated me for Senior Wisdom, the CLIO search function and Interlibrary Loan, Zotero, the Foodtown club card, the Writing Center, the WKCR Slack, $10 Carnegie Hall tickets, the 30-day unlimited Metrocard, Roulette Intermedium, the Baltimore Orioles, Broadway Dive, and New York City metro area FM radio listeners.

One thing to do before graduating? Walk from Columbia to the Met through Central Park, spend two hours at a single exhibit, and walk back the same route you came. Also, leave a snarky comment that starts with “As a Columbia student…” on a New York Times (or the outlet of your choice) op-ed whose take on student protests/Columbia University/higher education you object to. Combating misinformational media narratives starts with you!

Any regrets? How about an anti-regret? I don’t regret doing all of my readings. I got so much more out of my classes by going in with all the readings done and annotated. When else in your life will you have free rein to just read as much as your brain can hold, and have it all be interesting? If anything, I regret some of the readings I skipped—I could’ve squeezed so much more out of those lectures.

Ale via Ale