Confessions of a Cat-holic (164)

But at least I learned something about Korea. I told Sammy before too, it was that I thought the layman Koreans I saw on campus, in Korea town, and in real life were way better looking than those in the entertainment industry.

Eddie, no matter how attractive and desirable he was to me, was not the only good looking guy I had seen at Columbia. He was just among one of them. If I lived in a completely free world, I could have dated someone just as hot too.

For example, Wayne Ting, the president of the Columbia college student council a few years above me. He was recently chosen as the Time's TIME 100 the World's Most Influential People. He was the CEO of Lime, which was handpicked by Time as the world's most influential company list. He was the former head of operations of Uber, which helped turn the start up into a global phenomenon.

Daniel Okin, the vice president of the engineering student council of my year, even got on New York Times for wedding his wife, Katie Maurer. Dr. Maurer was a fellow in medical oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She graduated from the University of Rochester and received both a Ph.D. in immunology and a medical degree from N.Y.U. She completed her residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Dr. Okin was a fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, also in Boston. He graduated from Columbia and received both a Ph.D. in immunology and a medical degree from Yale. He completed his residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Adam Goldberg was the president of the engineering student council a year above me. Goldberg was elected VP-Internal of engineering student council e-board his sophomore year, and suceeded to the engineering student council presidency his junior year, with the likelihood of repeating as president the following year, becoming the first two-term student government president at Columbia. Goldberg resigned in September of 2006 in order to take a leave of absence to focus on developing CampusNetwork.

During Goldberg's tenure on student council, he was credited with developing the first online elections system for the ESC which is still in use today; creating an automatic birthday mailing system that e-mails students and alumni to wish them a happy birthday; and creating the Assassins application that kept track of players’ scores and the game ecosystem. Goldberg returned to Columbia as a member of the Class of 2007 and accepted a position on the ESC as Director of Technology. Goldberg was known for his prolific web design output, having developed a new website for ESC during his freshman year and following that up with his best known project on campus, the fledgling SEASCommunity, which was widely known as the precursor of Facebook. The site was relaunched in January of 2004 as CUCommunity, an e-community that rapidly developed a small but fiercely loyal user-base. CUCommunity had the misfortune of being overshadowed by the launch of Facebook at Columbia. Relaunched as a national social networking site called CampusNetwork in Fall 2004, it failed to gain much traction, and eventually folded. Goldberg, who had left Columbia and moved to Montreal with Wayne Ting to develop the project, returned to school in 2005. Goldberg also worked on sites including Carsplit, Facemix, Friendex (a 'Facebook' site for High School that predated Facebook's own entry into the market, which was terminated by Goldberg as a favor to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg). Goldberg also created the first prototype for WikiCU from a server in his dorm room in 2006. Due to Goldberg's excessive internet traffic, he received special permission from Dean Zvi Galil to be added to the CUIT bandwidth exception list from 2003 - 2007, thus allowing him to develop from his dorm room.

Following his graduation which was delayed because of the time he took off to work on CampusNetwork, Goldberg spent two years studying languages in France and Argentina. In 2009 he was announced a Founder’s Fund Tech Fellow and was awarded $50,000 for his development of Topic.org which is slated to launch sometime in 2010.

By the way, like Mark Zuckerberg, Adam Goldberg was Jewish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3XlyT4Ums8