Trade-Off

Introduction
I’d say the Columbia Student body is among the more international student bodies of any of the colleges I’ve ever been to or visited, I suppose. People seem to want to come here b/c of NY. Along w/ it’s being the most international, it’s also among the most diverse. Columbia’s in NY so there’s so much here to do in NY that a lot of the people are on campus aren’t really on campus. Whereas at other Ivies, they’re out in the middle of nowhere or they’re in Providence, RI and there’s nothing else to do but stuff on college w/ your classmates. So the trade off is at Columbia you get NY and everything it brings with it, but you also don’t get that cohesive Ivy League experience that you might say with Princeton and it’s Eating Clubs even Yale has fraternities and secret societies, Brown has its activist groups, I don’t know.

Campus Life and Social Life
I think what’s great about Columbia versus NYU is at Columbia you can have either. You can be completely at Columbia and do nothing but Columbia’s stuff or you can have the whole city at your fingertips. It’s a 15-minute subway ride downtown. Advertisement
Academics
I’m working for an education Non-Profit once I graduate. You’ve got a nice network here at Columbia, but if you want it, you’ve also got NY.

Student Body
The workload probably remains the same across 4 years, but after freshman year, you realize what you do and don’t have to do. So the amount of the workload that you shoulder gets much less. I suppose it can be pretty heavy. The core classes especially require a lot of reading and it could be difficult for an incoming freshman to just start reading Hume and the write papers about him. I probably take 4 or 5 classes a semester. I mean averaging, sometimes I’ve taken 6 sometimes I’ve taken 4.

In Closing...
Columbia like individual applicants, individual students so you’re test scores and your grades are important but maybe not as important as standing out in some way. For example, I was the editor of my school magazine for 2 years and we won a gold medal from Columbia. Columbia judges all of the high school magazines, all the high school literary journals in the country.
There are some downsides to the core curriculum, especially as an English major, I had absolutely no interest in taking science classes whatsoever. So the science and math classes I have taken to fulfill the requirement have been an absolute waste of time.