 Hello everyone. Welcome. Welcome again. I'm Weiping Wu, the Director of the Master of Science and Urban Planning here at Columbia, Chisa. Good evening, good day, good morning, wherever you are. Welcome to you all. I hope you're doing well and we appreciate that you're taking time to get to know our program a little bit. So we have an hour and a half and so let me just outline a little bit of how we're going to go about in that time. And we're also recording the session so I hope you are okay with that and if you are not, you know, just turn off your video. So I have my colleague, Keon Goldman, also on the line. She's the Assistant Director of the UP program. Good evening everyone. And we also have the Chisa auditions also in the background in case you're having any trouble with Zoom and so on and so forth. So I'm going to spend about 25 minutes to 30 minutes or so outlining the program, the curriculum. And then, you know, if you have any questions while I'm talking, just jot down in the chat box. Keon can answer or I will answer a little bit later. And then around 740ish, we'll have a few of our current students joining me and I will have some questions for them. Very general questions. Often prospective students are interested in knowing and then you can then ask them questions, ask me questions until about 830. So I hope this will be helpful for you. So as you can see from the image, this is the home of Chisa, Avery Hall. And so I know you all have made the decision to study urban planning, so I don't have to convince you about that. But why New York City? Why Columbia? And why Chisa? And that's, I guess, we want to outline a little more today to help you to make that decision. As much as we would like to welcome all of you to be on campus at Chisa when fall 2023 comes, really the most important, one of the most important decisions for you is to see the match between your interests and what we have to offer. So let me outline what we have to offer. So New York City, obviously, is a great context to study urban planning. And it's a global city. It's a city full of opportunities. It's a city still trying to come back during a pandemic. And it's a city also full of inequality and full of urban challenges. What better location to study urban planning than New York City? So this graph actually is a GIS illustration of inequality in New York City. And it illustrates the kind of critical analysis that planning students do in the program to try to understand where in the city inequality is most concentrated, for instance, where in the city is vulnerability most acute, say to sea level rise or to other disasters, natural or man made. And so the planning program here is very much grounded in this kind of social, economic and political analysis of neighborhoods and cities and using New York as a major laboratory. But of course, other cities and the global conditions the other cities are situated in as well. At the same time, this illustration is also very useful. It's also illustrates the kind of technical skills and especially spatial analysis skills that you will gain in our program. Our program is very much known for its spatial analysis. And so GIS is a core record course and our students gain very critical kind of not just skills but understanding of how to use GIS in your process of understanding a city and analyzing the city. We are also very much using New York to understand climate change and the changes that will be brought to the cities. So this is one of our data analytics courses called the environmental data analysis. So our students use actual data to analyze the scenarios in which sea level rise will affect different parts of Manhattan. And so you can see, right, when the sea level rise is at certain level, how much of lower Manhattan will be actually affected or flooded, right, lower east side, just east side of lower Manhattan. So to say New York is a laboratory is not overstatement, but also we are very much connected to the global contacts in which cities are situated. And so because of this kind of connection with practice and with what's going on out in the world, our curriculum is constantly changing and innovating. And I just want to give you some examples of the new courses we've created in the last three years, right. So we have every semester we offer about 17 to 18 electives. So each year we have something like 35 or so different electives offered to students just in the planning program. Of course, you can take electives across GISA and across Columbia as well. But as you can see, we're constantly trying to make sure that our curriculum is up to date with what's going on out in the world and what's going on out in the planning practice. And you can see some classes are more comparative in its approach. Other classes are directly addressed climate change and the need to plan for disasters, plan for sea level rise and plan for the kind of mobility that we need in this age of climate change. So for instance, I'm going to give you this example of future mobility workshop is a terrific new course we're offering right now this semester. It really uses big data using cell phone related kind of data to understand mobility, but also to analyze what future mobility patterns could be for different cities. So it's a course about the built environment and how we move around in the built environment. But it's also a course using big data. So we have a number of courses that are kind of like that. So I'll illustrate a little more. And then we have co-curriculum or extracurriculum activities. And so the weekly lectures in planning series is a major attraction to our students and alumni. And I hope some of you were able to download this earlier today for Michelle's talk about the native indigenous populations, water relations in the context of Canadian cities. So this is something we do quite a bit in fact, there's a lot's going on at Columbia. And another example was last weekend, our group of Chinese students or Chinese American Chinese Canadian students organized a urban China forum to look at how in the current environment and climate that sustainable urban development should take place in China and comparable places. And so it was incredible amount of interest that we had thousands of people dialing in in China through the WeChat platform. I'm pretty sure on this call right now, there will be students also dialing in from China. So again, you can see we really even in this kind of challenging situation trying to connect with what's going on on the grounds in China and have scholars in China speak to our students. So urban planning in China, sorry, at Columbia, I just kind of outlined some of these unique features. And let me then outline a little bit of our curriculum. And of course, we have a fairly storied history. It's been something like 80 to 90 years old program. And along the way, social equity has always been at the core. And then a global outlook, joined in as a very key component of the program fairly early on. And then we also have a accompanying PhD program that a lot of interactions between doctoral students and master's students. So quite a bit cross fertilization. And we have a dedicated group of full time faculty, you can essentially look up on the UP main webpage and Keon just put in the chat box, the URLs to go to our main page and you can see what faculty we have. And our faculty, the full time faculty is very productive in a sense of producing no knowledge about American cities, European cities, Middle Eastern cities, Chinese cities. And we are constantly on the look for new areas of research to inform our teaching. And so all of our full time faculty teach required core courses. So you'll have an opportunity to interact and get to know them. We also have a terrific group of very seasoned professional practitioners who primarily work in New York City, but also beyond as adjunct faculty teaching, you know, the elective courses and a couple of them teach also required courses. And they are not only seasoned practitioners, they're also committed educators in a sense they have been many of them have been with us for a number of years. And they have great confidence and attention in our students in a way that they've connected some of our students and alums to their own work for internships for jobs and for other kinds of connections. So it's really a win-win situation in a way that our students are readily connected already with practitioners, well at school and with opportunities that these practitioners and others can bring to students. So just give you this is just an example right at any given time in each semester we have about 15 to 20 also adjunct faculty with us and then the next semester following semester another 15 to 20. So over an academic year we have anything between 35 to 40 essentially you know that 35 to 40 electives right and we have these activities that connect students with adjunct faculty you know to have coffee to have other interactions. And so you get to know them of course taking courses is the best way to getting to know them. So the program is accredited and we just actually received the seven-year maximum accreditation last year for the next seven years. Two-year program full-time with 60 points required. Each point is somewhat similar to a credit so just think of as that. 27 points are required that include courses and the studio in the second semester of first year and then thesis a capstone in the second year. So then you have 33 credits for or points as electives and you can take it 12 of them in a concentration which I will outline in a minute or you can take the rest 21 points anywhere GESA Columbia. So that's yet another unique feature of our program that is we are quite flexible we also encourage students to explore other interests related interests and to really broaden your perspectives. So we have four concentrations and I will illustrate each of them in a little bit. As you can see we don't cover every aspect of planning we do in the core courses and electives some do but in depth coverage happens in these four concentrations. So given the moderate size of a full-time faculty we don't try to be very comprehensive so let's say if you're looking at MIT's planning program they cover everything right everything literally maybe Berkeley and to some extent Rutgers or to some extent you can. So you know I know these programs pretty well because I'm very involved with the profession of teaching planning so I've looked at curriculum of various different programs so I think we are unique in the sense we have strong focused strength we have a very strong anchor in the built environment since we are in the you know architecture school we also have a very strong commitment to social and racial equity we have a very strong global outlook and then we have a very robust urban analytics concentration we are one of the first planning programs in the country to really embark on that direction. So we now since last year have had a part-time option which means if you've had two-year full-time or four-year part-time equivalent right prior to applications application deadline is January middle of January so by that point if you had that much experience and somewhere related to planning you can go for the part-time option part-time option is about half course load and so we expect part-time students to finish in about four years instead of two years. If you have any questions about part-time options feel free to ask or email us. So this is the outline of the curriculum as you can see the first two semesters a little more required courses so the courses I listed there are required and then second year is full-time exploration and you can you know pursue one concentration or two about 40 of our students actually choose two concentrations so they have more kind of coverage of different topics. I generally encourage students in the first year to really explore to really see where your interests are already or maybe down the road so some students do change their minds so it's at the end of third semester that we inquire with students about their chosen concentration to make sure by the fourth semester they would already have completed the 12-point requirement. So another thing that's very attractive about our program is this dual degree option that we have with programs both within GISA and beyond GISA. So we have dual degree programs with everything I've listed nine different programs and some students apply at the same time to both programs and then you get in you can start a UP first or the other program first we really don't care we'll help you either way or some students come in to UP really want to explore more and then they apply at the second semester of first year to the other program so any questions just feel free to let us know. So build environment is perhaps the most kind of diverse concentration in there we cover some land use we cover transportation mobility environment because we really believe many of these are connected and we need to look at them together so you will see the largest number of electives in this concentration it is also the most popular concentration for students. Any courses marked with asterisks really satisfy two concentrations because we do believe there are lots of interconnections among different topics and so we encourage this sort of cross-learning and you can see examples of students working in a studio related to build environment last spring when finally we're able to have in-person contact with clients with communities and stakeholders and so when we choose studio topics we really try to also make sure different interests of students are considered so the studio topics often are of different nature. Community economic development is the concentration that really embeds our long-held tradition and commitment to social and racial equity so as you can see here we have not only engagement kinds of courses but also courses about housing affordable housing and about local government neighborhood land use activism so and certainly during this time of climate change about low carbon and energy transition through community-based approaches and that's why the second to last course on the list satisfies two concentrations and then in this is just an example of student work related to this concentration so I also want to kind of share with you another way that we structure of our electives so I would like to tell students that we have three types of electives the first type is what we call knowledge intensive so for instance we have a course called climate adaptation in cities so it's quite a bit about some summary you know science about climate change and how climate change affects cities and how cities have been addressing such issues so very much quite a bit readings a lot of discussion seminar type classes then we have what we call skill intensive electives and those you know all the urban analytics courses right and are like that so you learn skills sometimes data skills sometimes technical skills like side planning in the environment built environment concentration and then the third type is what we call quite innovatively for planning programs is curriculum so this course was a practicum in which they embarked on the project it's not quite as large as a studio but it's a real project in collaboration with the high school in washington heights in new york city to look at a street project right in front of high school so we are practicum in a way it's a little bit like a mini studio but we also have practicum courses that are more like case studies right we you know many of you probably know business school uses a case study approach to really understand how companies do work and we understand we're trying to understand how cities and communities you know cope with planning issues and challenges and and so in a way that also forms a practicum so international planning and development is a very much a strength of the program we don't try to cover all of the various different geographical regions of the world what we really try to do instead is to help our students understand how you approach a sort of commonly seen plan issue in a different place by analyzing local conditions by analyzing how practices in other places say the united states and then your destination for studio for instance might be in hong kong and next year actually going to go be going to the netherland and canada and so how do you really make sure what knowledge you've gained in school can help you work in the local conditions so in these international planning courses we not only try to understand how different cities tackle and understand you know tackle and cope with planning challenges in different local conditions we also try to help our students gain that critical framework to do work that is very much situated in the local conditions so finally we're able to travel again next spring we'll have travel studios and this was a travel studio to chile a few years ago so we're very excited about next spring urban elix as i said is growing it's the the newest concentration so it perhaps has the shortest list of electives but there are also other digital what we call the visual studies courses in gsoft that you can take and we continue to grow this concentration and you can also see not only data that's sort of purely big analytics kind of course we also have courses that are combined with domain knowledge like environmental data analysis and then using sensors which is really quite new for planning programs last but not least so we have some skills courses that don't count for any concentration but very very important for students especially those who have never had any design background really want to gain that knowledge and we have some of these skilled skills courses and then you can see the example student work for big data and data analytics here so i'm also very very proud that our program has very much you know attention paid to helping our students develop professionally that means career development but career services but beyond that we really try to help our students understand what they want to do in their career and how that can connect with what they study during the two-year program so in terms of advising we have three different layers first is keon and myself we can do we do general advising to make sure you satisfy all the curriculum requirements and especially for dual degrees and kind of complex and then this year we have a new position already at work associate director focused on career planning offering a vast category of opportunities of training in terms of workshops one on one advising sessions to help you start thinking about your career directions as soon as you get in and then at different points of the two years continue to help students think about those and then through programs such as mentorship with alumni through networking with alumni through career fairs through visits to planning organizations and offices to really expose students to how the various different kinds of practices that are in planning one of our goals is also to make sure that our students not only are prepared for jobs that are more traditionally for planners right in the public sector or in planning consulting firms but also to broaden the perspective for our students to work in neighboring fields and or what we call adjacent fields so you'll see in a little bit of where our graduates work and in many ways is how we have developed our curriculum to allow those possibilities last but not least you will have a faculty advisor who will really help you more with intellectual growth and also think about your professional interests and so on and then certainly in your second year you'll have a thesis advisor who may or may not be actually academic faculty advisor so you'll have quite a big connection with you know faculty through this sort of advising so our graduates as you can see so this information is based on a survey of our recent grads and the kind of careers they are in so we kind of put together something like a dozen or so career pathways to help our students think about their own so you can see the top few are what we call somewhat traditional rules for planners or planning students right and then we say you know the example organizations are exactly the places where we have alumni and then then what kind of coursework you should focus on and then as you move down along the table you'll start seeing career pathways are less traditional right so global NGOs and the next page you will see real estate firm urban tech firm design firm these are all places in which our graduates have had the opportunity to work in you know we actually have students who have worked at Apple have worked at Microsoft Google because you know many of these tech companies also deal with the local governments right deal with sort of real environment issues every year we have some students going for doctoral studies so we also are very much able to help those students pursue those interests as well so just want to show you some images of the kinds of activities we organize for career fairs we are very excited next semester we'll be able to have in-person career fair again since pandemic and so this was just before and this is the UP our program lounge and every year we do the school does a end of year show this is the this was the urban planning's end of year show showcasing their work in building sensors doing advanced spatial analysis and we're also very excited next semester we'll be able to do in-person again in the last couple years we've been mostly only doing you know virtual end of year shows and this is the lounge where our students hang out a great deal and so next to the lounge is a computer lab with 30 computers with all of the software required and then next to both rooms is a classroom where a lot of UP classes are held so the UP students essentially live here in a way we don't want them to live too long over 24 hours we do want to encourage a good life and work balance but this is a space that you will find all of the students most likely so the students also have an urban magazine and in which they can exercise their talent identify issues that they want to address so last but not least let me talk a little bit about the application process and the admission reviews so we have seven full-time faculty so every single application will be reviewed by three faculty and three different faculty members and they will come together to get a comprehensive score for each application then we go from there so we do look at everything in your package so this year GRE is not required as such we encourage you to really identify and tell us a little more about your analytical experience and skills in your personal statement we ask that you write at least 800 words I believe but double check on the application admissions page you know your experience can be quantitative or qualitative or both but we really want to understand how much analytical experience you've had because planning in a way it's a combination of design and social sciences I will be lying if I say you don't deal with numbers you definitely deal with numbers in this program I will be lying if I say you don't deal with the maps you definitely deal with maps and GIS and spatial analysis you definitely will be dealing with visualization you know how do you tell people or present to people ideas you have both in narratives and in visual forms so we would like to encourage you to do that so if I have to say that if one piece of your application is perhaps the most important I would say the statement the personal statement right that why do you want to study planning it's okay if you don't have any planning experience before our students come from a variety of backgrounds architecture is the simple the single largest a concentration of prior background but it's less than half and then we have people coming from geography political science sociology urban studies environmental studies biology math philosophy arts media communication everything literally everything so if you never had any urban or planning related experience tell us why do you want to study right tell us what's attractive to you and even tell us a little bit what do you want to do after you studied urban planning so that statement if anything go for longer not for short the more we can know about you the more we can gauge your interest in the field and your readiness to enter the field so not last but not least we do offer scholarships and there are three types of financial aid or in terms of scholarship that I can outline to you quickly you should really check out the school website for financial aid and they also have done some sessions they also they should have some tapings that you can watch if you missed those sessions so quickly while you apply if you're interested in scholarship you should indicate that interest you should also if you are an American student fill out the federal you know FAFSA form so that we have some understanding of your need but the scholarship that comes at admission is merit based so generally goes to applicants who have the highest you know scores after the collective comprehensive review by faculty so that's one type of financial aid the second type is TAs and RAs those are usually open more to second year students but if you have decided to enroll you will actually have the opportunities to apply and we have 18 positions every year for TAs and RAs each position is one semester and then occasionally first year students will get that it really depends on the match between the student's interest and preparation and the faculty and program needs the third type of scholarship is what we call need-based and that is only open to enroll the students once you come to Columbia TESAP there's a need-based scholarship it's five thousand dollar per person I believe you can apply not every semester but again you should check out the TESAP website okay so that's really quite a bit and I went a little bit over time but still if you have any questions feel free to ask now or in the chat box or send us an email or come visit if you can