First-year Tyler Hamblin has been named a 2011 National High School Scholar-Athlete from the Midwest Region by The National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame. Hamblin, who attended Cretin-Derham Hall in Saint Paul, Minn., will be honored at an awards luncheon on Tuesday, December 6 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York.

Columbia defensive back Tyler Hamblin

Hamblin is one of five winners of the 2011 NFF National High School Scholar-Athlete Awards, each of whom was selected as the best from their region of the country.  The five winners were selected from approximately 400,000 high school football players for their high school accomplishments.

Hamblin, who is now a playing for the Columbia Lions, said he is honored to have received the award.

“Receiving this award means a lot to me and I couldn’t be any happier to represent Columbia University by doing so,” he said. “I know the history of this award and the National Football Foundation and it is a blessing to officially be associated with such an influential and prominent foundation,” Hamblin said. 

 For more information about Hamblin and the  National High School Scholar-Athlete Awards, click here. 

A group of College students interested in careers in the entertainment industry gathered at the Columbia Alumni Center on November 28 for a dinner and discussion with actor and screenwriter Dan Futterman ’89, his wife and co-writer, Anya Epstein, and playwriting student Jason Kim ’08. The event was hosted by the Center for Career Education and the Columbia College Alumni Association Career Education Committee. 

The event was the first in a series designed to bring together alumni in specific fields with students looking for career advice and guidance.

“This sort of support wasn’t that easy to find when I was at the College, but it’s something I would have loved to have had made available to me,” Futterman said. “It’s a pleasure to help today’s undergraduates.”

Futterman, who began his career as an actor, has appeared on Broadway in Angels in America and in films including A Mighty Heart alongside Angelina Jolie. He was nominated in 2005 for an Academy Award for his screenplay for the film Capote.

Epstein started out as an assistant and writer on NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street. She and Futterman were writers and executive producers for the third season of HBO’s In Treatment and are currently developing a new series, T, for HBO.

Futterman and Epstein hired Kim him as their assistant for In Treatment. He is now in his second year at The New School, working toward an M.F.A. in playwriting. He previously worked as a researcher at The New Yorker.

Futterman told students to be wary of the maxim, “Write what you know,” and instead suggested, “Write what you can imagine and expand the horizons of what you know.” He noted that their new series, T, features a transgender character, and that he and Epstein did extensive research and are drawing on common feelings of alienation and search for identity in telling the story.

“Be willing to be surprised by what path you take and the opportunities that come to you,” said Epstein, who added that she never thought working at Homicide would teach her so many lessons that she could apply to her own work.

Kim said he came to playwriting after a period of indecision and an unhappy two-week stint as a paralegal. He advised students to be open to new possibilities and to “embrace the uncertainty.”

Alex Frouman, CC '12 Alex Frouman, CC ’12, has received a 2012 Marshall Scholarship, which will finance him to study for up to three years towards a graduate degree in the United Kingdom. Frouman, a member of the University Senate and resident advisor, hopes to study economics at Oxford. The scholarship commission has not yet confirmed where Frouman will study in Britain.

The Marshall Scholars program, founded in 1953 and named in honor of U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, aims to strengthen the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. Each year, up to 40 U.S. college graduates are selected for the scholarship. The goal of program is to help future American leaders gain an understanding and appreciation for contemporary Britain that will enable them to serve as cultural ambassadors to the United Kingdom for the remainder of their lives.

Frouman, who is majoring in math and concentrating in economics, said he hopes to further the mission of the Marshall program through researching economic policy and financial regulation. He believes that countries like the United States and the United Kingdom need to work together on financial reform because of multinational corporations and international competition.

“Countries like the US and the UK need to work together on regulating financial markets,” he said. “I really thought my goals and my research on financial regulation would be an opportunity to strengthen the bonds between the two countries and an opportunity for the two countries to work together.”

Frouman, who was born in New York and grew up in Westchester, has been a member of the Columbia University Senate for three years and is currently co-chair of the senate’s Student Affairs Committee. He has also been involved with the Columbia Political Union and the Columbia Political Review and has served as a resident assistant and a tour guide for the Undergraduate Recruitment Committee.

He said his experience working with faculty, administrators, staff, and students on the Senate, the University’s governance body, contributed to his interest in policy. His interest in financial regulation grew out of working with faculty and doing research in the economics department.

Frouman spent last spring working with a political science professor on U.S. financial regulation and is currently working with an economics professor on a research project on social security policy. He also worked as a summer analyst at Goldman Sachs and is a teaching assistant for an intermediate microeconomics course. He frequently attends lectures on campus related to the field.

“There’s a lot of opportunity at Columbia to get exposure to these issues and hear from the leaders of the field,” he said. “Everything here has been an inspiration for me to want to go into research and tackle these issues.”

Frouman said when he started thinking about what to do after college, his advisor recommended that he look into programs like the Marshall Scholarship. When he learned that had been selected for the scholarship, it was one of the happiest moments of his life.

“I feel humbled and honored to receive the award,” Frouman said. “My fellow students are a constant source of support and inspiration.”

Frouman said hopes to earn an M.Phil in economics through the Marshall program and continue on to earn a D.Phil or a Ph.D. Eventually, he said, he would like to work in government or do research and teach at a University.

James J. Valentini, Interim Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education, said he is very proud of Frouman, whom he knows through the University Senate.

“He is richly deserving of a Marshall,” Valentini said.

The Center for the Core Curriculum will present a lecture on “Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the Literary Imagination” at 11 a.m. Friday, Nov. 18, at Miller Theater. Professor Elaine Sisman, Chair of Music Humanities, will discuss the literary tradition of the Don Juan story and its reinvention by Mozart to become an opera of unsettling moral ambiguity. The lecture, which is intended to connect the various Core courses, is geared towards students in Contemporary Civilization, Literature Humanities and Music Humanities courses, but is also open to the greater Columbia College community.   

The lecture will give students the opportunity to think about Lit Hum topics in the context of Music Hum, including reinventing stories, gender and power, and how individual desires conflict with social responsibility. Questions addressed will include: What are the ethical and political implications of Mozart’s opera? Does the opera condemn the Don for rape, murder, and blasphemy or celebrate his freedom and sensuous life force? Of what is he guilty? For which crimes is he sent to hell? How vicious and guilty are his female characters? In the end, what are we told about human freedom, desire, virtue, and responsibility?

When Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte took up the story of trickster and seducer Don Juan, it was already featured in numerous plays and operas. But Mozart and Da Ponte turned a story of moral clarity into one of unsettling ambiguity. By the end of the opera, the audience questions the motives and actions of every female character—the two women the Don pursues onstage and the revenge-seeking woman he abandoned—as well as the supposedly irresistible Don Giovanni himself. Don Giovanni will be performed at the Metropolitan Opera this winter. 

To register for the lecture, click here. For additional information, call the Center for the Core Curriculum at 212-854-2453.