<p>Simple answer: yes.</p>
<p>Complex answer: most people here are very intelligent. Some struggle in certain areas. Some are lopsided: brilliant in one thing, completely idiotic at others (note that this is not just academic disciplines but common sense, people skills, etc). If you’re very proficient in a given area, you may see people fail laughably in that area. If you’re a scientist, you will hear people make completely idiotic statements in Frontiers of Science. If you’re a great writer, you will read some hilariously bad essays while peer reviewing for University Writing. If you’ve got a background in art history, you’ll probably laugh at some stuff people say in Art Hum. I tend to have the background assumption that anyone I meet at Columbia will have a good deal of proficiency in some area, and no one has proven me wrong on that score yet (obviously). But I have met lots of people who are incompetent in one way or another, or who don’t come off as “smart” at all (and I don’t even mean that they come off as something else, like “artsy” or “jockish”, I mean if I ran into them on the street, I would not guess that they were very bright individuals). So yeah, it’s not like being surrounded by a horde of super geniuses. It’s like being surrounded by a horde of people who are probably very good at one thing or another, but not everything.</p>