CU's not for everyone, but it is for me

Introduction
Most people that write on these things have only attended their own school. This is my second school, so I offer some more insight than most of these reviews.

The easiest way to know if Columbia is right for you, is to answer a couple simple yes-or-no questions:
Would you rather be in a fast-paced urban environment full of opportunities? Or would you rather be in a relatively relaxing and low-stress rural/suburban environment? If you answered urban, then that's Columbia.
Are you an independant person? Or would you like to learn to be an independant person? If you answered yes to either, then that's Columbia, too.
Those might be the only two important questions to ask. To ask things like "Do you want an outstanding education?" are ridiculous. Of course you do!

Campus Life and Social Life
You'll read a lot that the student body is not very cohesive. This is true. But this has nothing to do with the way the school works or the people that attend it. This has everything to do with the fact that you are in the middle of Manhattan. At other schools (Texas A&M, Harvard, Stanford, etc) you, as a university, are alone. There is no one there except college students (yes, even Cambridge/Boston is really overwhelmingly a college town). Here at Columbia we have the world at our fingertips. This inevitably means that people leave a lot to do things that aren't available to most of the nation's college students. If you need a close knit undergraduate student body, this isn't the school for you. If you want to enjoy a city of infinite adventures with your friends, then I'd say it is. Advertisement
Academics
I'm in the engineering school. It's pretty demanding. The workload isn't light at all. In my department (IEOR) the professors are great, but I've heard about some pretty bad ones in other departments. The TAs almost all want very much to help you with whatever you need. The only real gripe I have, is how much cheating goes on. I didn't witness this much cheating at my other school (Austin College), but maybe this is the norm and AC wasn't - I don't know.

Student Body
Students come from all over (of course, a plurality are from NYC). Tons of international students, and an unusually large amount of Jewish students. Extremely political, extremely liberal student body - sometimes blindly so.

In Closing...
If you want a challenge, enjoy having more opportunities available than you can reasonably take advantage of, and of course want one of the best educations in the country, come to Columbia. =Þ