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COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
Roar, Lion, Roar
Squash Opens Doors for Reyna Pacheco ’16
For Reyna Pacheco ’16, squash
has been far more than a sport.
An immigrant from Mexico,
Pacheco’s discovery of squash
was a defining moment in her life.
“I came to the United States with
my mom and my brother when I was
4. That was hard because we were
here, knowing that we could be kicked
out any day,” Pacheco says. “Because
of that, I didn’t feel like I could dream
very far. I felt like I was limited. But
when I was introduced to squash, that
completely changed my life.”
Pacheco discovered the sport in her
early teenage years at a program in
San Diego similar to the one that the
Columbia men’s and women’s teams
volunteer with at their home facility, the
SL Green StreetSquash Center in Harlem.
At a time when she was struggling
in school and the thought of attending
college was daunting, squash was
something that Pacheco enjoyed and could pursue with vigor.
“When I got into the program, I just fell in love with everything
about squash,” she says. “It taught me things I couldn’t learn in a
classroom: respect, commitment, dedication and hard work.”
Pacheco’s dedication to squash led to success in school as well.
She and her family began the process to gain documentation, and
she applied both to Columbia and the Gates Millennium Scholars
program. “I was sitting down with lawyers at the same time I
was sitting down to do my college applications,” Pacheco recalls.
With the necessary paperwork in hand and
her applications complete, Pacheco received
word soon after that she not only had been
accepted to Columbia but also was one of 1,000
recipients of the Gates Millennium Scholarship,
which provides students with financial aid,
leadership programs and academic support.
“I just feel so lucky every day of my life and
so blessed to have the opportunity to be here,”
Pacheco says of her time at Columbia. As one
of the top recruits out of an urban squash program,
Pacheco played as the primary No. 2 for
CAMPBELL SPORTS CENTER SCOREBOARD
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Stories
144
Seats in
theater-style
meeting
room
Squash helped Pacheco gain the self-confidence to
succeed in school and become a Gates Millennium
Scholar.
PHOTO: GENE BOYARS/COLUMBIA SPORTS INFORMATION
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Columbia as a first-year, winning five
of her first eight matches.
Seeing that her hard work has paid
off and wanting to give back, Pacheco
is happy to volunteer in the squash
community. “Our team here volunteers
every week at StreetSquash and
I keep in touch as much as I can with
the kids in San Diego,” she says.
In December, Pacheco was a member
of a four-person delegation representing
the World Squash Federation
that went before the International
Olympic Committee in Lausanne,
Switzerland, to make a case for
squash’s inclusion in the 2020 Olympic
Games. She was joined by WSF
President N Ramachandran, CEO
Andrew Shelly and the No. 1 ranked men’s player in the world,
Britain’s James Willstrop.
While the other three presenters were there to inform the
IOC of the global reach of squash and the technical aspects of
the game, Pacheco provided a human and emotional element to
demonstrate the impact squash can have on an individual.
“My role was to show what squash has meant to my life,”
Pacheco says. “If you look at Olympians, their stories are very
impactful in the way their sport made it into their lives. We
wanted to show that squash is real and that it
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Conference
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is touching a lot of lives.”
A second meeting with the IOC is planned for
May, which will focus on the technical aspects of
the sport. A decision is expected in the fall.
“It was such a unique experience,” Pacheco
says of her trip to Switzerland. “Meeting all
the people behind the whole movement, the
president of the World Squash Federation, the
CEO and the world No. 1 now — it was very
impressive to be a part of that committee and
to present to the Olympic Committee.”
6,400
Square feet in
strength and
conditioning
center
Literature
Humanities
Turns 75
On the main floor of Hamilton Hall, just to the right as you approach the Dean’s Office, is
the Witten Center for the Core Curriculum. It’s an interesting suite of rooms. The reception
area has a corner cabinet filled with the current texts of Contemporary Civilization
and Literature Humanities — open it and the faint, pleasant smell of new books fills the
air. There’s also a large conference room where Core faculty gather for weekly meetings,
offices for administrators, and a library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and tall, sliding
ladders. The bookcases contain Core texts from different eras, and often several editions of those texts, along
with works of criticism and other related subjects. Taken together, they provide concentrated, tangible evidence
of a conversation that has been ongoing, in the case of
Literature Humanities, for 75 years.
In all those years, countless hours have been given over
to thinking about the texts. But as the College celebrates the
75th anniversary of Lit Hum, this is an opportunity to pay
the course itself some considered attention: as an institution
of Columbia College; as a tradition that bonds each first-year
class as well as students across generations; as an exercise
in reading and listening and critical thinking whose impact
across two semesters — and beyond — differs for every student.
There is no truth universally acknowledged about Lit
Hum, and therein lies one of its greatest appeals.
The following pages contain articles about the origins and
evolution of the course and the way it is taught, the perspectives
of the faculty who teach it and the experiences of the
students who take it, as well as a look at an alumni book club
whose members make selections inspired by a Lit Hum ethos.
If reading this section rekindles your memories of Lit Hum,
please share them with us at ccalumni@columbia.edu.
Alexis Tonti ’11 Arts
PHOTO: LESLIE JEAN-BART ’76, ’77J
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