Hey guys! I’m a freshman at Columbia University, I was reading this forum because I’m applying to transfer, and thought I’d share my statistics since I’ve found this thread to be very helpful in the past!
TO ALL COLUMBIA SEAS WAITLISTERS: It’s possible to get off the list!! Two other SEAS kids on my floor and I got off the list, so there might be hope for you! I don’t know about the application pool this year, but hopefully it will be kind to you!!!
Accepted: Columbia (SEAS, off waitlist), University of British Columbia, CU Boulder, Colorado School of Mines, and Case Western
Waitlist: Carnegie Mellon (had to decline because they gave me almost no aid)
Denied: Yale (EA deferred), Stanford, Cornell (was forced to apply, so I submitted the wrong essays since I didn’t want to go…), Tufts , Cooper Union
Objective:
SAT I: 2290, CR 720 M 780 W 790
ACT: 34 (35 superscore, if that matters?)
SAT II: Phys 700, Math I 770, Math II 800
GPA (out of 4.0): 3.8something uw, 4.2 w, upward trend (I got a C and five B’s as an underclassman)
Rank: 2/316
AP (score): US History (3), English Language (3), English Lit (4), Phys B (3), AP Calc AB & BC (5)
IB: Not available at my school
Senior Year Course Load: AP Calc BC, AP English Lit, Drawing I, French 3A, and I took a semester of bio, a semester of French, and two semesters of chemistry at a local college since my high school stopped offering several AP’s my senior year
Major Awards (USAMO, Intel etc.): National Merit Finalist, AP Scholar, Junior of the Year in Math, Senior of the Year in English, First Place in School junior year in American Mathematics Competition
Subjective:
Extracurriculars (leadership in parenthesis):
Science Research Club 11-12 (Founder, President)
Robotics Club 12 (Co-Founder, Co-President, Head Programmer, Co-Head Design and Construction)
Nation Honor Society 11-12 (President)
Spelled “National Honor Society” wrong on all my applications hahaha, I was so sad
Key Club 10-12
Theater 9-10
Not allowed to participate after sophomore year since I never took any theater courses
Speech and Debate- 11-12
I did humor and was soooooo bad my first year, but did pretty well my senior year
Boy Scouts 5-12 (Senior Patrol Leader, Assistant Senior Patrol Leader, Troop Guide, Quartermaster, Order of the Arrow)
Almost got my Eagle! My project was cancelled like two weeks before my eighteenth birthday!
Varsity Tennis 9-12 (Co-Captain)
Thrid place at Regionals my senior year
Work Experience: Taught tennis to little kids
Volunteer: A whole lot. Local soup kitchen, homeless shelter, lots of stuff with Boy Scouts, a lot of stuff with Key Club, helped with events for Big Brothers Big Sisters
Essays: I wrote an essay about James Franco and my depression (it sounds weird, and it kind of was. It was pretty different), Science Research Club, and talked about how much I love and want to protect the environment for my supplements (also talked about making a Van de Graaff generator out of trash my junior year for an example of creative sustainability)
Teacher Recommendation: One was really, really nice, and the other made my mom cry… (in a good way)
Counselor Rec: Really nice!
Additional Rec: None
Interview: Alumnus interview for Yale, which was actually a nightmare. He disagreed with LITERALLY everything I said. If he asked my opinion on something, he’d spend a few minutes once I’d responded telling me why I was wrong and how I should actually feel. After fifteen minutes he told me not to be so nervous since he saw my hands were shaking like crazy (Yale was my dream school), but he made me feel like such an idiot the entire time!! It was horrible! I’m a pretty shy person, so I was already trying my hardest to represent myself as best as I could, and it just felt awful for that to not be good enough for him.
I also had an on-campus interview for Yale, which was okay. I made them laugh a couple of times! But it may have just been polite laughter. I really didn’t know how to feel about it.
Other
Applied for Financial Aid?: Yes
Intended Major: Environmental Engineering
State (if domestic applicant): Colorado
School Type: Less than stellar Public
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Gender: Male
Income Bracket: under 50k
Hooks (URM, first generation college, research, etc.): Ha! I don’t know, maybe that I did robotics yet was in love with the environment and breathe music and literature? Survivor of adverse childhood, as my father was an alcoholic, maybe?
Reflection
Strengths: Test-scores, Recs
Weaknesses: GPA, not a lot of opportunity to do much research in the middle of nowhere
General Comments:
WARNING: Long rant about why I’m transferring from Columbia. If you don’t agree with me, I do have a very different basic assumption of human relationships and interactions since I am from a very small town in the middle of nowhere. You could probably say the mindset I’ve grown up with is just incongruous to that of a school in the “middle” of the city.
However, I hope anyone who likes Columbia gets to go!
I’m (hopefully) leaving Columbia because I’ve found it was absolutely the wrong match for me. I feel like I’m suffocating in the middle of the city, since even Central Park doesn’t feel natural. New York City is very, very expensive, and Columbia is very good at making the campus seem like a safe, nice place to be. Just this week, two men were kidnapped at the Medical Campus (a car stopped and they were literally just pushed in from the sidewalk), and a few weeks ago a student was mugged just two blocks off campus (this accident was at night, and I guess the area’s pretty safe during the day, but I still don’t want to risk getting kidnapped). Last night, our eighth or ninth student died this academic year, with at least four of the previous deaths being suicides (we don’t know about the rest, and the others were kind of just swept under the rug at first). I was identified as in “urgent” need of psychological help when I was first diagnosed with dysthymia this semester, yet it took almost a month (more than three weeks) for me to get an appointment at student psychological services. There’s pretty much no community, and people say that you have to find your community, which is true to an extent, but everyone’s so elitist, shallow, and self-absorbed that the only community I found that I wanted to be a part of was the marching band. They, along with people who are friends of the marching band, are the only nice people on campus who don’t have something against having fun. Note, I do not consider getting drunk to be fun, probably because, as I said, my dad was an alcoholic. Drinking is the go-to method for people here to have a “good night” here. People come to “enjoy the city,” but it is so expensive that it’s hard to “do” much, but you can participate during the week in psychological studies, which pay enough for a round-trip metrocard. Still, everybody except two people I’ve met would rather stay on campus than explore the city! It’s so weird! Everyone comes for the city, but no one leaves campus except to get groceries or drunk! Ah! It’s so frustrating! My friends who I enjoy hanging out with the most all go to Barnard, because Barnard women in general are so much more laid back and understand that lives are short and shouldn’t be concentrated on material things, like our future pay-grade.
That being said, both the college and engineering school are great. (I was lied to about the SEAS curriculum during the information session I attended and was really shocked when I received my freshman schedule three weeks before school. The engineering curriculum is really good, but it’s so rigid that you can’t really take more than one class outside of engineering per semester, and you really only have time for the required classes your freshman year!) You will get placed into a great career upon graduation, I just feel like maybe there’s more to a college experience than just that. If Columbia is the right school for you, you will have a lot of fun here! But that goes without saying. There are a lot of diverse, cool clubs to join, too! (I didn’t join that many since the people in them were mostly there to have something to put on their resume, and the other members are generally very exclusive [from what I’ve found])
I’ve applied to Swarthmore and Brown for political science and English, and was considering just dropping out of college if I didn’t get in. BUT I figured that those schools are crazy hard to get into, so I’m applying to CU Boulder again as well as the University of Arizona.
I hope this helped at least one of you decide! Hearing back from colleges is an incredibly exciting time, and I wish you all the best of luck!!! Visit, visit, visit colleges before attending!!! College-visit-experts always say to approach random students and talk to them about their college, and I always felt too scared to, but just do it! Everyone I know (except a few rather nasty people) would love to talk to you about their university, especially if you are excited about attending! (I actually did this at Princeton, which is what convinced me not to even apply, and I’m still glad that I didn’t!) I hope you will all have happy college experiences, wherever you end up!!! Maybe I’ll see you next year!
