The Aquanauts’ project, which reimagined an under-utilized space behind the Mudd Engineering Building as an innovative green roof and social space, was one of a handful of honorees selected from more than 200 entries. The group collaborated with engineering Ph.D. candidate Rob Elliott, who spearheaded the project as part of his thesis work.

To read more about this exciting achievement and to see the group’s award-winning video presentation, click here.

Click here to view a video recap of the conference.

The event was a great opportunity to learn about the evolving world of sports journalism and to connect with successful journalists. As always, we are extremely grateful to everyone who supported the event—it was great to see alumni and current students come together under the Spectator umbrella. We hope to see you at our next event in the fall!

Eye Art Director Suze Myers, BC ’16, said the magazine’s editors made a decision earlier this semester to use old photographs more often. When they ran a lead story on women filmmakers, they pulled old movie images from the Library of Congress’ Flickr stream, because they were in the public domain.

For a lead story last month on the role of athletics in the Columbia community, the Eye team wanted a similarly vintage aesthetic—something “you can’t get today,” Myers said. With that in mind, they took to the Spectator archives.

“It would have been easy to use sports images, pictures of sports equipment, but the link directly back to Columbia was nice,” Myers said.

Myers found in the archives a treasure trove of exciting visuals, including not only athletes but cartoons and old advertisements.

“We also kept getting distracted reading the issues we were looking through,” she said. She noted that Eye Editor in Chief Rikki Novetsky actually found an article by her mother, a Barnard student at the time, that ran on the front page of Spectator.

But besides just being impressed by the old issues, Myers said it was fascinating to see how the paper has changed design-wise, and how photography has evolved with the use of more advanced lighting techniques and DSLRs.

While she doesn’t necessarily have plans to use archive images regularly, Myers said she’s gotten good feedback on the designs the archive photos were used for. “Just in general it’s such a vast resource,” Myers adds, “we’ll definitely use it in the future.”

In the 1927 yearbook, Samuel E. Murray III published a succinct yet comprehensive history of the first 50 years of Spectator’s existence. It’s a wonderful look at our history that we only recently discovered. From photographs and illustrations appearing in various issues in the archives (currently dating back to 1953), it’s clear that some Spec traditions—like a commitment to the arts and representing the student voice in key administrative decisions—have stood the test of time.

To view the events included in Murray’s article as an interactive timeline*, click here.

Not a kid anymore, his personal record for solving a puzzle is 4:35 — that’s four minutes and 35 seconds — in a Monday edition of the New York Times crossword. That time, while not the fastest in the world, is just a shade longer than it would take some of us to find a pen.

We in the alumni section highly doubt that one could solve Finn’s latest NY Times puzzle in 4:35. But we do know that the piece, which was published on March 10, “dazzled” puzzlers like Deb Amlen. Amlen wrote in Sunday’s NY Times that:

 “Today’s puzzle is gathering CONDENSATION, like the droplets on a water glass, and what an amazing construction it is. I’m just evil enough to allow you to find all of the rebuses on your own, but I’ll throw one out there: at 27 Across, the answer is [WATER]GATE SCANDAL, with the WATER crammed into the first square, and crossing that, the answer to 1 Down is WIT[HHO]LD, where the letters HHO (or H2O) is crammed in the very same square. Mr. Vigeland, currently a student at Columbia University and the managing editor of the university newspaper, The Columbia Daily Spectator, does this an amazing six more times in this Sunday grid.” 

Spectator, of course, has its own crossword puzzles as well. We did a bit of digging through the online archives, and found the first “Daily Crossword Puzzle”, published on Page 27 of the October 29^th, 1992 issue. The puzzle, flanked by a Doonesbury cartoon about the Iran-Contra Scandal, suggested a flair for music. Be the first reader able to solve this puzzle, found by clicking here, and we’ll announce your name on this website! If you find yourself craving more, be sure to check out Spectator’s new Friday series in partnership with Crossword Nation. 

Following the Q&A, recruiters from the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, ARChive of Contemporary Music, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, StarChefs, and Red Shirt Entertainment will be available to chat with students.

Tickets are $5 and you can RSVP to the event via Facebook. The event will be at 1 pm in the Spectator office (875 Broadway, between 111th and 112th streets, 3rd floor).

 As announced via Twitter earlier this week, our digitization campaign is complete! Over the past five years, Spectator and Columbia Libraries have worked together to carry out this $250,000 initiative. By next February, our existing online volume, consisting of years 1954 through 1992, will be joined by the rest of Spectator‘s and Columbia’s great history. In the words of 136 and 137 Publisher Alex Smyk, “the digitized archives will be a fantastic resource to our staff, alumni, and the university/neighborhood — they are at once a giant training manual, a looking-glass into the past, and a source of great pride for our school.”

A hearty thank you to everyone who contributed to reaching this goal; we absolutely could not have done it without you.