Confessions of a Cat-holic (166)

Guy worked as co-founder of Vericant, a company that helped US schools better understand their Chinese applicants through on-demand video interviews. Guy was also an advisor for several other startup companies. Outside the office you would most likely find Guy on the field playing Ultimate Frisbee or on the phone with someone, somewhere speaking Hebrew, English or Mandarin. He was based in Beijing.

After studying in New York for four years, I had just grown to be more sensitive to Jewish faces. After all, the Jewish Theological Seminary was based in the heart of Columbia's campus. You couldn't miss it when you were walking around campus. Apart from seeing Scarlett Johansson and Hanson on campus, I also saw Jamie Fox and Ross Geller (portrayed by David Schwimmer) in New York City. Ross was by far my favorite character from Friends, after Jennifer Anniston.

Just from estimating based on my personal experience living in Manhattan and statistically speaking from my subconscious 6-degree-of-separation social experiment, I could confidently say that there were around 30% Jews in the student body. The rest of the student body, from my own statistics, would be around 40% Asians (including Asian Americans, Southeast Asians and Asians from Asia), 10% international students, and 15% white and another 5% that could be black, Latino or mixed races.

As I said, Jews were not considered "white" in America, even though their skin looked pale enough. They were technically Middle Eastern. Therefore, many colleges had posed affirmative action to lock up the quota for Jewish students, which was also a problem for Asian Americans.

Even though Columbia was hugely left-winged and racially diverse, there were quite a number of good looking white guys on campus. But you just wouldn't see them play beach volleyball like what I saw at Princeton.

David Chait, the president of college student council in my year, was the founder and CEO of Travefy, after graduating from Columbia Business School and Columbia College. He worked at McKinsey as a management consultant for two years before business school. His mission was to power the success of travel professionals. Travefy’s award-winning itinerary management and productivity tools helped travel advisors and professionals save time and impress clients. Travefy powered thousands of travel businesses ranging from small, independent travel advisors to the largest travel organizations, consortia, and providers. David Chait was named 2017 “Entrepreneur of the Year” by the American Society of Travel Advisors among other honors.

Jared Were, the president of engineering student council in my year, grew up in an upstate town Edinburg of New York where everyone knew everyone with a population less than 2000. He was a three-sport athelete, as an engineering major at Columbia University. He worked at Bain & Co for a few years before he joined National Hockey League.

Jared majored in applied physics, materials science with a minor in economics. But too bad he was taken. He met his wife, Zulekha Inayat, at the engineering student council and had been dating since. They were married after college. Zulekha Inayat was a civil engineering and earned her master in property management at Columbia. She also had an MBA from Columbia. She had been working in real estate development and financing since then.

Jared was elected as one of the "Forty under 40" by Sports Business Journal.

He had a dog named Mango and a child Rowan.

And there was Tom Fazzio, the president of engineering student council a year above me. He looked like Brad Pitt and was allegedly an Italian American. On some website, it said that he was the creator of the blog, intractable finance. He was a graduate student at MIT focusing on quantitative finance, and with a degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University. He previously worked at Goldman Sachs in the Hedge Fund Strategy and Alternative Capital Markets groups.