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"Listening to: &amp;quot;Forever&amp;quot; by Drake feat. Lil&amp;#039; Wayne, Kanye West &amp;amp;amp; Eminem I have good news! I got to register for not just one, but four World Leaders Forum events... four! Coming into Columbia, I&amp;#039;d heard about the World Leaders Forum and knew that I wanted to be part of it. It&amp;#039;s such a cool concept and really an opportunity that I could never get anywhere else, so of course I want to take advantage of it whenever I can. So, when I got the email about registering for the first World Leaders Forum events this year, you can imagine how freaking excited I was for it!   The World Leaders Forum at Columbia is a series of presentations to students throughout the year from key international figures who are experts in their respective fields - politics, economics, the environment, religion, international relations, etc. In the past, there have been some really impressive people who spoke, like U.S. President Bill Clinton, the Dalai Lama and Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations. Since registration opened at 9:00 a.m. and was on a first come first served basis, by 8:55 a.m. I already had my computer on and ready to go, prepared a plan of action for which events I wanted most and would register for first, and I was furiously refreshing the webpage every 20 seconds or so. As you can tell, I&amp;#039;ve had a lot of experience with this sort of thing from my years of snagging concert tickets on Ticketmaster. Well, it turns out I didn&amp;#039;t really need to be as intense about the World Leaders Forum events. I was able to register for four of them, so I guess spots don&amp;#039;t go as fast as I thought they would. But I guess it doesn&amp;#039;t hurt to be prepared...  This week&amp;#039;s events were mostly presentations by experts in politics/international relations because they coincided with the Fall General Assembly Session of the United Nations. I registered for the talks by Nigerian President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (coolest name ever!), Croatian President Ivo Josipovi\u0107, and an event on the Challenges of the Drylands which featured a few East African leaders. I was put on the waitlist to see Jos\u00E9 Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission (I should&amp;#039;ve registered for that event first... tactical error!), but thankfully I got into that, too. The Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (seriously, I love saying that name!) event unfortunately got canceled, but the other three events I saw were ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! Just knowing that I was hearing first-hand about such important perspectives on world issues was kind of mind-blowing. Now, I am super excited for the other World Leaders Forum events that are to come throughout the year. I hear Al Gore, former U.S. Vice President, is coming sometime soon to talk about sustainable capitalism, so hopefully I&amp;#039;ll get to see that, too. And, I&amp;#039;m also not-so-secretly hoping that sometime in the next four years that I&amp;#039;m at Columbia, President Barack Obama will come here to speak (especially since he&amp;#039;s a Columbia alum!). If/when he does, you can bet that I&amp;#039;ll be at my computer again refreshing that registration webpage a zillion times. What events are you looking forward to at your school? Let me know in the comments below! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.seventeen.com/life/school/advice/a12466/world-leaders-forum/>