 Hello, everyone. I'm Weiping Wu, the Director of the Master in Urban Planning Program, our Master of Science in Urban Planning Program here at Columbia. And I have my two colleagues joining me today, but before I ask them to introduce themselves, let me quickly say another welcome and also share two resources with you in the chat box as you talk or as you join this session. And one of the reasons I'm sharing this is that yesterday we had a fantastic day welcoming many admitted students in person. And I know some of you were not able to make it. So the first link I just shared with you. So there will be a recorded session of the introduction and overview of the curriculum from yesterday to be posted on that page. So stay tuned and you'll see more information on that page. And then the second link is the landing page of the Urban Planning Program. I would encourage you to explore, discover and connect with us by reading some information on this page, two pages carefully, especially on the first page. There are a number of student works as well as a program booklet that you can download to read with, you know, whatever time you need. And I would encourage you to do that and then reach out to us with any questions. So let me allow my colleagues to introduce themselves. And then we're going to start with a few common questions the students ask faculty. And then you should feel free to drop down your questions in the chat box. I will monitor that or just raise your hand electronically and I will get to you. It's probably a little easier to put in the chat box. And this is a session to really have a conversation between you and the faculty so it's not about over viewing the program. And so let me start with my colleague Anthony. Hi everyone. I am an assistant professor here in the program, actually realizing all the people speaking today are also recovering designers. So I also do have a design background if you're coming from that. But I teach primarily in the urban analytics sequence. I would kind of categorize myself as an urban technologist. So I personally my research and some of my teaching look at the intersection between technology, urbanism and the people that inhabit these fantastic or sometimes not so fantastic urban spaces and thinking about how we utilize that data either through the creation of it or the analysis of readily made data sets to actually improve the urban condition for folks. I guess this is my turn. So good morning everybody. Can everybody hear me? Anthony, raise your hand if you can hear me. Great, okay. So I'm Douglas Woodward. I'm the associate director of the program for professional development and practice and what that means in English is career services mainly. And then also I coordinate studios and I've been an adjunct since 1991. So I also teach mainly New York centric courses like zoning and other sort of practical things in the New York area. And I'm trained as an urban designer and I founded the urban design group at the department city planning where I was for 18 years followed by a stint at Lincoln Center and then 10 years at a developer. So I've been at knowing the government in the not-for-profit world and then also in the private development market. So that brings an interesting I think perspective to both courses and also to placements for students for their first jobs and internships. Thanks Douglas. I just want to add really quickly everyone. I am thrilled that Douglas is with us because I actually in the last few years have pushed very hard for this program to have this capacity of career service and advising. It's really beyond service. It's advising to really make sure when you come to our program your aspirations for your career are connected closely to what you study in the program. So Douglas talks with every student one-on-one in addition to many career services you know the regular activities you see in on college campuses, right? So you obviously also will have connections with an academic advisor. So Anthony, myself, and other faculty members obviously will put you on that role. So really quickly introduction to myself for myself. I've been a faculty here and program director since 2016. Before that I taught at Tufts University as well as Virginia Commonwealth University and my teaching responsibilities here are both in the master program and in the doctoral program and in the master's program I teach studio every other year and the thesis. All of the full-time faculty advise thesis and capstone and I also teach an elective on Chinese urbanism in global context. So with that let me start with a few questions to my colleagues and I can also chime in. I really would encourage you to put down your questions in the chat box and feel free. Don't be shy. Planning students are always the courageous sponge so I hope to see some questions. So maybe let me start with both of you Anthony and Douglas, right? So what do you see as the kind of faculty-student relationship at GSAP especially in UP, right? What kind of individual attention do you give to students and how accessible you are as a faculty? So maybe you will start with Anthony. I mean I think that's the highlight to be honest. I've had an opportunity to be at a couple universities now and I think the availability of faculty I think is really a highlight of this program. Perhaps you know sometimes I've been told to a fault for myself, sometimes I need to make a little bit less time but I think that's a favorite part. Some of you even saw me kind of in the hallway at the coffee shop when we were having what was supposed to be a short discussion and ended up being a little bit longer but I think that's the hallmark. I think especially the full-time faculty being very around. The chances to kind of speak engage with both curricular and extracurricular aspects. I mean I know Doug will speak a little bit about engagement with his office but I think you know for us the faculty represent a lot of different professional paths. We all have varied professional experiences in varied parts of the world and I think my observation is that students you know have been very kind of open and willing to engage with us in thinking about what are the paths be it traditional or non-traditional? How do we shape our classes? What are the questions that classes are asking? What's going on in the larger world? So I think that there is that kind of strong engagement but I'll say you know I think one aspect is every program will say that. I think the other strength of our program that is very unique to us is that the adjunct faculty are in the you know kind of in the best spirit of the adjunct. They are being in a city like New York bringing professional experience and seeing the amount of students engaging with someone who is currently you know preparing something that will go before DCP or someone who's working in government and having that connection with people who are very engaged both here at GSAP but also very engaged in practice I think is a real hallmark you know and sometimes there are kind of interesting debates that happen you know between that of what happens in the classroom what happens in the world and we you know could really think about how the sausage is made in shaping these better environments. So I think that connection with the faculty in an intimate way here I think is like kind of just really special and a strong hallmark and I think it actually strengthens a lot of the classes because there's a lot of information being shared that reemerge in different conversations with informally and formally. One of the things that Anthony is talking about I think is really important and that's that at GSAP practices are not opposed that they're actually complementary and so when you get out into the world you'll use the theories and the no the GIS and the other things that you've learned at GSAP but you'll also have an appreciation beyond other schools I think in terms of what the practical consequences are of the things that you've learned and being in adjuncts myself and we're native studios one of the really nice things about adjuncts you'll find is not only are they committed to the program and they are very committed but at the same time they are a great source of jobs so you shouldn't be shy at all in in having adjuncts help you sort of navigate the job world I'll certainly do it as well but I can point you to adjuncts we're teaching in the program who are at the firms that you want to work at I mean you will find very often in New York we have a lot of international firms as well and so we're not it's not just the local department of city planning or the local parks department that we have contacts at we also have contacts at AACOM and and international organizations that are centered in New York as well and so this is a conversation that we've been mentioned I have one on one with every student we have in the program just to learn about you and sort of to figure out with you what kinds of things you want internships and jobs and we do very well right in the middle of interviewing and people are getting interviews right and left so there are a lot of this interview sessions that I've been running out of the office yeah let me just add really quickly and you might know have noticed that the number of full-time faculty in this program is quite moderate in the sense that's both by necessity but really also in to some extent by design because we are in New York we are a professional program and we really like to see our master's students very much career-ready by the time they graduate so we have about 40 adjunct faculty to in the program so they are seasoned practitioners and they are very much you know in the spirit of helping the next generations of planners to blossom so they are very committed to the program and I work quite intensively with each and every one of them in terms of you know helping them onboard with teaching and developing syllabi and developing teaching pedagogies developing you know methods of student engagement within the classroom and then many of them in fact stay with us continuously some you know Douglas for example has been with us for extended period of time and so this adjunct faculty group is something we feel a very very unique feature of the program and also as Douglas was saying we really try to prepare students not just for your you know mainstream common and typical planning jobs we are now increasingly getting adjunct faculty who are in the urban tech sector who are in consulting who are perhaps in real estate practices where in these sectors there are increasing roles and functions for planners and then we really do feel for planning the profession to grow and we need to expand and and that's what where our program is doing and and we have expanded our curriculum accordingly so that we have you know for students knowledge and skill acquisitions in neighboring fields but with very strong planning orientation so let me also then follow up this question with another one to Anthony first that is in what ways do you collaborate with students who are interested in research on perhaps even going on to further research career or doctoral studies so I'll one of the other aspects so since we made mention of our adjunct colleagues who are bringing in kind of professional experience I think one of our jobs as the full-time faculty is that we're doing a lot of research in a way kind of asking questions of the built environment or taking things forward and there are many opportunities from myself and from colleagues to engage in this type of research and I think what's interesting is is that we all kind of have a different take on what urbanism looks like so I know that Hibabu Akkar just had a big symposium here on campus looking at Middle Eastern Studios so she was working with both masters and PhD students to flesh out kind of that discussion looking at the state of research out there I'm working with one master student where she is running a natural language processing algorithm on Street View images to see if we can actually catalog all the languages being spoken in the suburbs like you know so there are direct engagements in working with us in answering kind of these questions that may have future implications or may look at the built environment in different ways that may ultimately inform policy or how we think about the built environment you know in many cases there are maybe more projects that are geared towards implementation and there are many ways that you can engage with us with that there are also a couple labs as well that master students have engaged with quite a bit for instance the Center for Spatial Research has quite a few master students so they're doing a lot of really interesting work and in between kind of urban data science critical cartography sociology digital humanities where you could where you can kind of flesh that out and that that'll say all of these are coming from you know the faculty side and being kind of the intellectual base you all also have chances to do research and you know you'll definitely do that in your thesis or capstone where you are in the privacy and you're engaging with us being able to kind of derive hypothesize a phenomenon in the built environment and taking that forward and sometimes those kind of conversations spill back and forth between our research and your research there's also I'll say a couple students here as well that I've talked to have also began especially I think because we have this base of kind of technical skills again I have a bias towards you know working with people who have kind of maybe more data skills other people on campus are also looking for you too I know a colleague of mine in engineering is potentially taking on one of our master students for a summer research position just because engineering has sometimes deeper pockets than we do so be able to support that so you know that's in brief but I think that there are many ways that you can engage and it comes from multiple sides and also say another secret that there's money floating around on campus so if you wanted to do your own independent research there's ways to support that from the resources on campus and just to plug a few of our students also participated in projects in the city as well so data by design a couple students got I think it was six thousand dollars or so to do an installation a data-centric installation for open data week in the city a couple of our students also came up with a project and they did a session at Open Data Week which is a citywide project a citywide initiative so there are chances to even kind of go beyond us but I think you know the there's a strong kind of culture here of I want to say entrepreneurship when it comes to asking questions you know and taking it forward into doing really interesting things with research at different scales from the potential publishable paper you know or if you're interested in the doctoral studies working with faculty to your own personal initiative like the open data week for your portfolios you know there are different ways to look at it thank you for my opinion at least yeah so let me actually share with you all a link which you can open now a actually right now it doesn't have a whole lot of information but once you enroll you will get email during the summer for these r.a. positions you can apply for for the fall and for spring positions the application process usually opens in October or November and so as Anthony was saying all of the full time faculty members in this program work with at least one student as r.a. and you can find out about the faculty research interest in this program booklet I just put it in the chat box which is also on our main web page as well as the open house web page for urban planning program there you will see who the full time faculty are and what their research interests are so I mean I'm being completely honest so with r.a. positions it's possible for first year students to get because of the matching of research interests but for teaching assistantships generally they are offered to second year students because they need to assist courses of first year right so they will she should have taken those courses already so each year the urban planning program has 18 positions each position is one semester and which has both tuition benefit roughly 8400 dollars and then plus about little over 3000 stipend and then as Anthony was saying there's other units in in the school that you can also apply for r.a.s and then there are units across campus which you would then be more in charge of looking for those information but all of the positions within GSAP would be made known to you during the summer if you decide to enroll