Theo Burke shares his wisdom in the form of plugging Latenite, making friends, and discovering The Unwritten Rules of Columbia.

Name, School, Major, Hometown:
Theo Burke, CC, Math-Statistics (Economics Concentration), Washington, D.C.

Claim to fame: 
LateNite Co-CUPAL Representative, COOP two-time base camper, Greenborough 4R <3, starred in LateNite’s “Daddy” (2018), which Bwog called “by far the most uncomfortable play of the night”
Once fell asleep eating milk and cookies on the couch and woke up 6 hours later with the glass resting in my hand, still full

Where are you going?
I’m moving to San Francisco. fetCH!

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

1. College is the chance to catch up on all the emotional growth you probably neglected getting into Columbia! Time spent learning about yourself or developing new kinds of feelings or relationships is never wasted and will provide better insurance against becoming a sad repressed adult than even the highest-paying finance job or best med school.
2. Your professors will be very accommodating about extensions and exam accommodations! In college, your only adversary is the ambition with which you choose your classes at the beginning of the semester–everyone else is on your team. If the only way you’re going to take down that monster of a midterm season you signed up for in September is by asking for an extension for every paper and project you’ve been assigned, so be it! Your professors will be supportive.
3. Columbia has a lot of unwritten rules and they are all stupid. One of them is the tacit secrecy around success (and failure). People don’t share success because they think it’s braggy or hyper-competitive and they don’t share failures because they’re embarrassing. Friends don’t tell each other what fellowships they’re applying for or what class they barely avoided bombing. This is so dumb and will make you feel alone and misunderstood. Another unwritten rule is that you shouldn’t talk about class or *gasp* upward mobility. This rule is supposedly because we are all at the IVY LEAGUE to CHANGE THE WORLD but really it’s because many of your classmates are already RICH AF.

“Back in my day…”
amigos :(

Favorite Columbia controversy?
Sophomore year someone in Broadway received a copy of the Kama Sutra with an anonymous note saying that if they were not going to close their blinds they should at least do it right (the sex). Gross, pretentious, and just potentially homophobic enough to attract The Discourse. I loved.

What was your favorite class at Columbia?
Linear Regression Models and Time Series Methods with Flavio Bartmann. This answer is kinda cheating because if you’re taking this it means you’ve already taken the stats core sequence (Intro to Stat —> Probability Theory —> Statistical Inference), but all that really means is you’ve done three theory classes that built on top of each other with some vague promise of applications in the future. Well, 4 classes in you finally get there, and the feeling is like a semester-long dunk completing what has been a two-year self-alley-oop. He covers what I’d say are THE iconic theorems & models of stats myth—Ido’s Lemma, Black-Scholes, Gauss-Markov, Brownian Motion–with a lecture-style full of anecdotes and history. Super fun!

Second Place goes to Economic Growth & Development with Xavier Sala-i-Martin.

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese?
I feel like cheese was THE funny thing in elementary school. Then in middle/high school sex became that funny thing. Guaranteed laughs. Easy Money. Sex was so funny because none of us really knew what we were talking about and cheese was the same. No one understood it then and no one understands now–it’s gooey, it’s delicious, it’s an animal? Not important. We’re too busy with sex. Anyway, I think that difference speaks to sex being better than cheese pretty definitively, and the same goes for oral sex.

Whom would you like to thank?
For putting up with me: Sam Kodama.

For believing in me: my parents, Nina, Steve Rosenthal, and the Jonathan D. Schiller Scholarship Fund.

One thing to do before graduating?
Visit the Dodge Sauna! Being naked makes for good conversation.

Also rush Latenite!!!!!!

Any regrets?
I didn’t make any friends that were math/stat majors until the end of my junior year (refresher: I study that) because I thought they were all boring nerds. I regret!!!! Math is one big inside joke that every math student is in on, so you might as well commit to the bit and find an audience.