New Dual Degree Program – TAU & Columbia University
Tel Aviv University is proud to announce its newly launched new Dual Degree Program with Columbia University.
As part of the Dual Degree Program, students will begin their college education in one of six academic programs at Tel Aviv University, and have the opportunity to immerse themselves in two elite research universities whose academic, social, and cultural environments allow students to take advantage of the best that both cities have to offer.
The Program, which will welcome its inaugural class in the fall of 2020, transcends traditional study abroad opportunities by providing the opportunity to pursue a rigorous undergraduate liberal arts education spanning two continents. Upon completion of the four-year program, graduates earn two bachelor’s degrees, one from each institution.
The program joins the Columbia University School of General Studies’ current portfolio of highly regarded international undergraduate dual and joint degree programs with Sciences Po, Trinity College Dublin, City University of Hong Kong, and List College of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). Created in 1954, the joint program with JTS was the first program of its kind to be established at the School of General Studies.
For any information such as admissions, costs & curriculum please visit the joint dual degree website.
Was he serious about it at the time? “Absolutely not,” says Prof. Rechavi. “I didn’t think it through, and didn’t think people would be interested. It was just a tweet, I didn’t think about it for more than a few seconds.”
Nonetheless, within hours, Prof. Rechavi got responses from scientists all over the world.
(Colleen Murphy, molecular biologist from Princeton, and Piali Sengupta, a neurogeneticist from Brandeis)
(Ahna Skop, geneticist from UW-Madison)
(Javier Irazoqui, microbiologist from the University of Massachusetts)
Within days, Prof. Rechavi received hundreds of messages from people who wanted to participate. And so, two days after the original tweet, the idea became a reality:
“One of the great things about Twitter,” Prof. Rechavi says, “is that it feels like a big, global community of scientists who want to learn from each other and support each other. I want the conference to feel that way too. I want it to be friendly and welcoming, I want people to feel supported by the crowd. That kind of environment is great for collaboration.”
The “Woodstock of Science”
Woodstock.bio is different from other conferences. The event will have 75 speakers, with very short talks, and presentations containing only one slide. The order of speakers within each session will be decided randomly, to keep things fresh and spontaneous.
Each speaker will choose their own “Walk Up Song”, a short musical intro, like when a baseball hitter is walking up to the pitch. As soon as one person is done talking, a random generator will decide on the next song, from among the speakers listed for that session, so the order will be a surprise even to the speakers themselves. Prof. Rechavi hopes this will make the event feel more like a festival, and takes being compared to Woodstock as a compliment.
“But these studies did little to tap into the inner worlds of children, which really can only be accessed through self-expression in the form of art or self-reporting, independent of parental intervention, which is the route we took in our study,” Prof. Zaidman-Zait says.
“Our study makes a valuable contribution to the literature by using an art-based data gathering task to shed new light on the unique aspects of the relationships of children with siblings with intellectual disabilities that are not revealed in verbal reports,” Prof. Zaidman-Zait concludes. “We can argue that having a family member with a disability makes the rest of the family, including typically developing children, more attentive to the needs of others.”
The researchers hope their study, supported by The Shalem Foundation in Israel, will serve as a basis for further research into art-based tools that elicit and document the subjective experience of children.
