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Name, School, Major, Hometown: Ben Parkhurst, Columbia College, Linguistics major + jazz minor, San Francisco/Los Angeles

Claim to fame: Opening for JID at Bacchanal 2024 with Chandra, PBK, TAing for Intro to Linguistics, getting an A+ on a final project that I wrote while sitting at Smalls jazz club freshman year, playing jazz for 3/4 university presidents that were in office during my time (I never got Prezbo)

Where are you going? Between California and New York until (hopefully) getting into a Linguistics PhD program

What are three things you learned at Columbia and would like to share with the Class of 2030? 

  1. Explore the city as much as you can! There are so many neighborhoods and parts of this city that are wholly unique and unlike anything you’ll experience anywhere else. My top recommendations are Jackson Heights, Astoria, Sunset Park, and the East Village. It’s also totally worth going out of the city and state—Cold Spring, Fort Lee, Montauk, etc are all a pretty short trip away, and are relatively cheap to get to.
  2. Resist the Columbia University dark triad—careerism, nonchalance, and what ifs. This looks different for everyone, but the most actionable things that helped me with this were:
    • Getting off of social media
    • Taking the classes that have both interested me AND either taught me new skills or helped me to develop existing skills
    • Seeking out community wherever I could, from sitting with random people at the dining hall to making group chats for classes to going to random office hours 
  3. Find your limits. College is a great environment to try a lot of things and see how large your social battery is, how many commitments you can handle, and what you’re truly capable of. To not take risks (of course, within reason) is to waste this opportunity.

“Back in my day…” JJs had sweet chili sauce which was legendary with their wings.

Favorite Columbia lore? The FroSci scandal.

What was your favorite class at Columbia? A few faves:

  • Introduction to Linguistics with John McWhorter! A super fun class to take as a student and to TA for, it really changed how I thought about language before coming here and all but confirmed what I was going to end up studying.
  • Language Documentation & Field Methods with Meredith Landman! This class is the culmination of everything you do as a linguistics major—you have to learn how a language works from the ground up, starting with the sounds and getting into the complex grammatical phenomena, and it’s a blast along every step of the way. 
  • Language Crossing in the Latin Caribbean with Francisca Aguiló Mora! I have no idea when it will be offered again but an absolutely no-brainer take if you speak Spanish. I’d even say it’s worth going through the entire Spanish sequence just to take this course.

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? Well, there are like 2,000 types of cheeses, but only so many different wa-

Whom would you like to thank? So many people! Thank you so much to the linguistics faculty—Meredith Landman, Bill Foley, Maya Barzilai, John McWhorter, Ross Perlin, and Nikita Bezrukov—to the my peers in the Jackson (h)Eight group chat—Gio, Jackson, Jacob, Sarah, Tin, Yan, Sophia, and Sofia—to my parents, everyone who I’ve made music with in the last four years, and to everyone who put their faith in me and has helped me to come this far.

One thing to do before graduating? Hot take, you should study abroad in the summer instead of during the academic year. I went to Buenos Aires my freshman summer instead of doing a semester somewhere and am so glad that I did. Also, 

Any regrets? None that I didn’t learn from. 

Ben via Ben