Congratulations to the Class of 2021

The department is extremely proud of all of our students and would like to honor this year’s graduates! We look forward to when we can all come together and celebrate in person.

First, a tribute from our faculty!

During Class Day, awards were given to students who excelled in academics, students with independent research projects, and to those with outstanding performance in teaching and services to the department. The list of awardees is in this year’s graduation handout.

Professor Augustin Chaintreau received the Janette and Armen Avanessians Diversity Award for outstanding research and leadership in advancing diversity in departmental, school, and university programs at Columbia.

At this year’s commencement, more than 600 students received a computer science degree. Click on the logos to see the CS graduates from each college.

Student spotlight

More memories from the past four years…

Columbia and Barnard students attend the 2019 Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando.
Lydia Chilton is the best professor at Columbia hands down. No one brings energy to the CS department the way that she does. GOAT. - Dillon Hayes
Ciaran Beckford and The Ngo at the PennApps 2017 Hackathon.
Charles Baird coding in the kitchen.
AI Generated Artwork, JR Carneiro CS SEAS '21 and Caroline Lin CS CC '21
Bryan Lei and John Wang at the AP Hackathon in Spring 2018
Audrey Cheng with fellow SWE interns at a Salesforce intern event in Denver, Colorado.
Cryptography with Tal! This class was so fascinating. - Ari Hirsch
Arkadiy Saakyan with friends at the tree lighting.
Anushri Arora took this photo of Olha Maslova while they were working on an Analysis of Algorithms problem set at the DSI lounge in late February 2020 - just before the "Stay at Home" story began.
Anastasia Dmitrienko and fellow TA Sophia Kolak giving a midterm recitation for CS Theory.
Amir Idris with the Columbia Data Science Society 2018
Alexander Peile and Tracy Chen declaring majors
Alexander Cohen on the right with other (non-Columbia) students in San Francisco during an internship.
Alex Horimbere on the day when he arrived at Columbia.
Left to right: Cesar Ramos Medina, Iliana Cantu, Ecenaz Ozmen, Yefri Gaitan, Daniel Garces Botero at Google Games. Where they won the most energetic table. Go red team!
Daniel Hanoch (in black jacket) and co-workers at the Earth Institute.
Yarden Carmeli at the Low (High) Beach
The Operating Systems group Maya, Ecenaz, and Ahmed grinding hard for OS projects.
Tanvi Hisaria, Manav, and Aeshna making the best of the Zoom year!
Shout out to DSA with Professor Bauer because he is almost always online, super approachable, and really makes an effort to help me understand CS concepts in general. - Andrew Molina
Sarah Radway and Sophia Kolak at Hack Harvard...trying to win "most useless hack" and still losing.
Sharon Jian with former and current TAs for UI Design grading together
Payal Chandak exploring the tunnels on campus
Rediet Bekele sneaking a Post Lab 7 nap in AP class (Sorry, Jae 🙁 )
Romy Zilkha studying at Butler Library
Rupal Gupta at Googleplex, where she interned her junior summer, and will be joining full-time.
Sara Bernstein and Rebecca Narin (BC '21), who became good friends after taking COMS 1004 together, as they finished their last class of Freshmen year!
Owen Bishop, Dominic Dyer, Jackson Storey, and Jon Lauer at the park.
Omer Fahri Onder kicking an opponent at the MIT taekwondo competition
Huge thanks to Professor Blaer for an engaging, fun, and interesting course in data structures. The knowledge I gained in this course has been the foundation for my coding abilities and a sturdy rock in my journey to becoming a data science graduate. - Aaron Morrill (with his sister, Haley)
Visiting Giphy as a part of Entrepreneurship Via Exploration with Anne Xie, Jenny Li, Monika Francsics, Sungbin Kim, Jeff Huang, Jordan Ramos, and Nico Molina.
Michael Karasev, Chris Mendell, Rodolfo Raimundo, Nathelie Hager, and Sabrina Selleck. After flying to El Paso during finals week and pulling 3 all-nighters, they were finally able to watch their scientific payload launch on board of Blue Origin's rocket.
Harrison Qu in matrix code.
Left to Right: Kelsey Namba, Serena Tam, David Ji at the Princeton Hackathon.
Lucas Hahn
Manasi Sharma at the GROWTH 2019 Conference at San Diego State University during a coding challenge.
Mariya Delyakova and COMS 1004 classmates a week before COVID hit.
Marwan Salam in Havemeyer 309 - Concluding AP Lecture
Jonathan Sanabria (center in blue) with other members of the Columbia Robotics Club working on a prototype for an underwater ROV.
$Discrete Math got me like...$
Discrete Math got me like...
Jinho Lee on a site tour of Google.
Jin Woo Won and Junyao Shi at the AP hackathon, hacking away as Jae played some music.
Jeffrey Kline - remembering long days in the library.
Malware Analysis is a great class - I love reverse engineering and learning how programs and operating systems work, so this class was particularly fun for me. - Christopher Smith (with his very sleepy pup!)
Samuel Fu's internship memories in 2019
JADE cohort January 2018 at Facebook
Jason Herrera the the Brooklyn Bridge in 2019.
Giovanni Sanchez hanging out with friends at Faculty House.
Gael Zendejas, Vikram Ho, Xiao Lim, and Adam Lin at the AP Hackathon.
Ryan James and fellow classmates in AP
From left: Kelsey Namba, Sarah Leventhal, Serena Tam. Taken in Lerner after a whole evening of working on a lab assignment in Advanced Programming.
Beom Joon Baek with James Valentini during Freshman year.
The Operating Systems group Maya, Ecenaz, and Ahmed grinding hard for OS projects.
Daniel Hanoch (in black jacket) and co-workers at the Earth Institute.
Danny Parrill at the virtual Columbia GS Honor Society induction.
Dorothee Grant and Serena Killion in class when Professor Sethumadhavan took attendance by having the students send a photo of them holding up their UNIs.
Daniel Halmos presenting the architecture for a group project in Topics for Robotic Learning.
Left to right: Cesar Ramos Medina, Iliana Cantu, Ecenaz Ozmen, Yefri Gaitan, Daniel Garces Botero at Google Games. Where they won the most energetic table. Go red team!
Professor Brian Smith is the best! - Rico Pesce