<p>For those of you who attended CU, is there a 'rivalry' between college and fu kids (like Wharton vs. CASpenn)? Something that I have never understood is that, Fu kids statistically have MUCH better GPA's/SAT's, yet their acceptance rate is nearly 3 times higher than the college. I've known many College and Fu students, and both claim that the other is "inferior". i.e -> College kids say fu kids are antisocial, fu -> college kids are just dumb. But it seems to me that the college kids are just "better" (holistically). Anyone wanna comment on what the general consensus of the CU community is? (Which is better). Oh, and we all know Barnard is fake CU, so that doesnt even count =D</p>
<p>There are lots of SEAS jokes (nerd stereotypes, etc.), but they're very good-natured. There isn't even an anonymous online flame war over SEAS as there is sometimes concerning GS or Barnard. A lot of it has to do with the deeper level of integration among CC/SEAS students, who live and dine together. It also doesn't hurt that a lot of the initiatives for campus events/school spirit stuff come from the SEAS student council. I think the presence of SEAS helps the campus achieve an important balance.</p>
<p>Fu drives Columbia's overall SAT score up but the overall acceptance rate up as well. Even exchange, I say. There's a greater self-selection process with engineering, so less unqualified people apply, resulting in a higher acceptance rate. But the SAT range does prove that the academic quality of students is not lower. The College has a lot of options, and if you don't like one discipline, you have many others to choose from. Fu is far more restrictive as there are less options and all are quite credit-heavy. This scares uncertain people out of applying to SEAS, especially when the CU website says that SEAS kids have no advantage over anyone else in transferring to CC, even though people on these boards say otherwise.</p>
<p>Yeah. Aside from good-natured jokes about "why don't you get back to your problem set?" "Why don't you go write some poetry and get a job, you pansy?" back-and-forth, there really isn't much between CC and SEAS.</p>
<p>The level of BC enmity has kinda gone down as well. I mean, most columbia guys are all for a system that gets them basically 2 girls on campus for every guy. Most of the hate comes from Columbia girls who sit around telling each other how much smarter they are than the BC girls, and how they're "taking our men". I'm biased - I basically lived at Barnard for two years and had a barnard gf 2+ years - but I find barnard girls to be much more chill, down-to-earth, and less catty. I know a lot of guys who feel the same way but just don't get worked up about it. The marching band, however, gets their occasional cracks in. In fact, the best Orgo Night poster I saw in 4 years there had the slogan "By and large, Barnard women are bi and large", which is still funny to me 100 times later.</p>
<p>GS students get treated like second-class citizens by the administration (see the other discussion thread about GS for more) but by and large, they're somewhat ignored by the 3 other undergrad schools because our lives intersect with them so rarely.</p>
<p>I think the point is, you can't take any of that pride/rivalry stuff too seriously, and few people do. Life's too short, and college life is especially too short.</p>
<p>-Steve</p>
<p>I agree with everything that's been posted so far. I don't think there's a "rivalry" at all. There are jokes / stereotypes going both ways, but both schools greatly respect each other. I don't think people seriously think SEAS is inferior because it's (arguably) easier to get into or that CC is inferior because there's no way many CC people could survive SEAS classes.</p>