<p>how much does the core dominate your first two years at Columbia? what is the proportion of core to non-core classes that you take? there are parts of the core that i like, but i'm concerned that it will take away my chance to use college as a time to explore subjects that i don't plan to major in/concentrate on later in life. also, what are the arts humanities and music humanities classes in the core like? are they hard? do you feel that they're interesting or useful?</p>
<p>i'm trying to decide if i'll be able to have the feeling of freedom and ability to explore any random intellectual interest i have at columbia that i would have at a liberal arts college like swarthmore. i really want to be able to explore throughout college, and im concerned that the core will be restrictive.</p>
<p>The core takes up 1/3 of what you will take here.</p>
<p>Freshman year you’ll take:</p>
<p>University Writing/Frontiers of Science
Literature Humanities</p>
<p>so you have 3-4 class slots for anything else you want. I’m in the engineering school so I had a bunch of required classes like Orgo chem, physics, math etc, but you’ll have to take those anywhere you go. I’m planning to have a minor in addition to chemical engineering, and I’ll be taking a language as well as pursuing history classes.</p>
<p>The core won’t take up as much as you think, plus the swim test sounds uber fun</p>
<p>In my experience, core classes have all the things I’ve always wanted to study in one nicely packaged bundle, so it was not restrictive for me at all. The vast majority of students either double major or major-concentration.</p>
<p>kiwi, don’t forget about language. Unless you test out, you have to take language classes for the first two years. But still, that’s only 3 classes per semester. You still have two or three classes each semester for electives. You don’t have to declare a major until spring of sophomore year (and you can change it after that) so you do have time to explore.</p>
<p>^I don’t know, you tell me how easy or hard it is to get a 780 on SAT IIs or a 4 on AP language. But in my experience, for kids who had some high school knowledge of, say, Spanish or french, they can easily skip two or three levels of the language. So it becomes just one or two courses overall for the language requirement.</p>
<p>yeah it is pretty easy to place out if you have some experience.</p>
<p>but a word of caution on the lang requirement. college lang classes are much tougher/intense than your hs classes. which means what you think is a walk in the park does require some effort.</p>
<p>though the more obscure the lang the easier it tends to be.</p>
<p>Just like OP, I’m also worried that Columbia’s Core, though scrupulously structured and time-tested, would somehow deprive me of my newly gained freedom and restrain me from taking all sorts of classes and try out my whims, especially in unfamiliar or not directly relevant subjects.
That’s why I can decide between Columbia’s Core and Brown/Amherst’s Open Curriculum, since I don’t have any straight career plans and want to keep things open.</p>