Long live frivolity, tomfoolery, malarky, hooliganism, rapplerousing, and utter nonsense. 

Name, School, Major, Hometown: Eliana Steele, Linguistics (kinda) + Philosophy, San Ramon, CA

Claim to fame: Secretary-General of CESIMS, Laidlaw Scholar, WBAR DJ, Teaching Assistant, Hypocritical Luddite, pseudo-intellectual. 

Where are you going? Teaching English in Indonesia with Fulbright ETA, then doing a Master’s in Speech, Language, and Learning at Northwestern University. 

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

1. If you can’t be perfect, at least be interesting. Be chronically open-minded. Talk to everyone. Have conflicting political ideologies. Join multiple religions. Wildly postulate. Go to parties alone. Take random classes. Say yes to (almost) everything. In short: fuck it, we ball.

2. Don’t associate with people who frequently use LinkedIn. Most of my greatest successes throughout my collegiate career began with arbitrarily following my whims and subsequently becoming invested in something that was previously irrelevant to me. Also: Phone bad. AI bad. Even if it gives us rabies, we will free the iPad babies
3. Your haters will be your waiters when you dine at the table of success. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it points towards justice for those who are dorky and sincere.

“Back in my day…” Back in my day (that being 2022), everyone told me that a linguistics degree would be useless if I didn’t combine it with a CS double major. Nowadays, CS people are just as unemployed as the rest of us!

When I began my freshman year, masks were still mandatory and Broadway was lined with testing tents that didn’t take my insurance for some reason. Everyone in my immediate family, except for me, got COVID while moving me into Brooks. Columbia was the best school ever; Columbia kids were kind and clever.  

Favorite Columbia lore? Last fall, I ran into Cornel West in the hallway of Union Theological Seminary on my way to a town hall with Curtis Sliwa in Lerner.  

What was your favorite class at Columbia? Introduction to Philosophy of Language with Karen Lewis. I took it freshman fall, and it opened me up to a completely new way of thinking. Like, I could feel the gears turning in my brain during every lecture. It made a massive impression on me during a pivotal time in my life. Also: Endangered Languages in the Global City with Ross Perlin, Phonetics and Phonology with Meredith Landman, and New Wave French Cinema 

Would you rather give up oral sex or cheese? I’ve been a preachy vegan since 2019. Nutritional yeast, on the other hand… 

Whom would you like to thank? My beautiful Shabbos Goy Jesus Vargas; the Jackson (H)eight group chat; the Locke’d In group chat; my senior thesis advisor, Bill Foley; my roomie/freedom fighter Huda; the CU Luddites; the raccoons in Riverside Park; and all those with whimsy in their souls.

One thing to do before graduating? Physically fight someone. 

Any regrets? I regret engaging in a sort of secular Calvinism wherein I would deny myself simple joys while also not achieving any goal by doing so. I wish I engaged in more frivolity, tomfoolery, malarky, hooliganism, rapplerousing, and utter nonsense. 

Eliana via Eliana