Looking to Join CSI? You're in the right place! Review this page and complete action items to get started.
How to Join
The Columbia Space Initiative consists of 10 “missions”, which are projects spanning various topics related to space science. Students can join one or multiple, and we recommend that prospective students explore multiple missions at the start of the year! For more info on our missions, check out the mission description pages on this site and find mission updates on Slack below.
Welcome to the 2023-2024 CSI year! Everyone should attend our annual Liftoff Meeting, on September 15th (4pm in Mudd 833), to get all the information you need about CSI and individual missions! If you miss Liftoff due to schedule conflicts or religious observances, don’t worry: A link to the recording will be posted in Slack over the weekend, and we will have a backup session on the evening of Thursday, September 21 with details posted alongside it.
CSI has no application! We are open to all active Columbia/Barnard students.
As a club, we hold general body meetings weekly on Fridays at 4pm. Gbody meetings are held in Mudd, the Engineering building on the corner of 120th St and Amsterdam Ave, room 833. The majority of CSI missions meet directly afterwards, although there are a few exceptions. Please ask mission leads about scheduling.
Find us on Slack and sign up with your school email. We use Slack for internal communications, announcements, memes, file storage, and more. You can download Slack as an app or open it up in your browser.
Please add a contact photo if you’re comfortable doing so, as this helps all of us get to know each other.
Join a few channels! Interested in a few particular missions? Click “add channel”, and search the mission name. Feel free to poke around!
Direct message Co-Presidents Matthew Werneken or Minju O’Rourke at any time with questions, or ask in a mission channel. We try to reserve #general for announcements and club-wide notifications.
Subscribe to our newsletter by filling out the form at the bottom of our website homepage, if you haven’t already. Official club-wide announcements are organized and sent out each week by our secretary, Valentina Marini Fichera, so don’t let this hard work go to waste! This is a nice tl;dr of all the Slack announcements.
