The grind never stops unless you stop it.

Name, School, Major, Hometown: Ryan Puterbaugh; Columbia College; Linguistics and Theatre; the island from Wii Sports Resort

Claim to fame: Niche student-theatre micro-celebrity and captain of TWO Columbia Esports B-teams. Made 30-minute video essays during COVID. 

Where are you going? Korea! I’m doing a program at Yonsei University’s Korean Language Institute in Seoul over the summer, and who knows after that.

What are three things you learned at Columbia and would like to share with the Class of 2028? 

  1. Say hi to the staff you see every day. You’ll recognize the dining hall workers and security guards and they’ll recognize you, so learn their names and make conversation! 
  1. Make sure you get out into the city OFTEN. You may think you will or say you will, but stuff’s gonna pile up and suddenly you’ll realize you haven’t been south of 110th in weeks. Don’t let that happen! Make the effort and go have fun in NYC while you have comparatively cheap housing. 
  1. Schedule your classes around your favorite dining halls. 

“Back in my day…” Chef Mike’s had four different soups every day.

Favorite Columbia lore? The streets say that Bwog had to change this prompt from “Favorite Columbia controversy?” this year for some reason, but no one seems to know why. 

What was your favorite class at Columbia? 

  • Phonetics and Phonology with Meredith Landman. If you like the idea of violently contorting your mouth to try to make all the sounds of the world’s languages, or analyzing your own speech with audio software to graph your accent, or investigating how sound systems change over time, this class is for you. 
  • Computing in Context with Adam Cannon. Designed for non-CS majors, this is a great place to dip your toes into programming and get a sense for its use in your area of interest. It has a few different discussion sections, from Economics to Art to Linguistics and more.

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? I’m sorry. I tried… I really did. But I failed. I spent three days brainstorming and scrolling through old Bwog® Senior WisdomsTM in a fruitless attempt to come up with a witty, original, and digital-footprint-friendly response to this question, but the funny bits have all been done. There’s no dairy pun unmade, no sexual innuendo undropped, no entendre undoubled. I used to think I was pretty clever—Now I see that I’m nothing but a spineless hack fraud too afraid of public embarrassment and hypothetical future employers to take a stand for my personal values and commit to the gosh darn bit. To everyone who believed in me or who was looking forward to my answer, I can’t apologize enough. You all deserve better… You deserve cheese someone who won’t give up when it counts. I only hope that cheese the rest of my “wisdom,” if it can still be called that, isn’t cheese tainted by my shortcomings in this answer. Thank you, sincerely, for reading.

Whom would you like to thank? My sisters, my dad, my mom, my Lola, Dave, Gary, and Betsy Cole, my professors, all my friends here at Columbia, the UCLA TFT Class of ‘24, Nina Lam and Julia Dooley, the incredible people of Hooda Halal, and the guy who traded me a Woodbridge C for my Hartley double sophomore year when I transferred in. 

One thing to do before graduating? Buy my first piece of Columbia merch…

Any regrets? Not stopping to smell the roses once in a while. It was nice to fill my schedule with passions and extracurriculars, but I wish I had left more time for personal relationships and for myself. The grind only never stops if you never stop it.

Ryan via Ryan