<p>I have to resolve a dare: my classmates would say that my undergraduate program is of a comparable standard to Ivies, since a professor with collaborators in Ivy League schools claimed Brown and Dartmouth weren't exactly at our undergraduate level and that upperclassmen with GPAs 3.4+ in my program could excel at any Ivy League university.</p>
<p>However, since I know Cornell, as well as HYP, are of a similar undergraduate standard to us in physics, and that I assume that my professor is close enough to the truth to assume with some degree of confidence that Brown and Dartmouth aren't exactly the best at the undergraduate level. I'm not sold that Columbia is actually any better than Brown or Dartmouth for undergraduate-level physics, though. So how good is Columbia for undergraduate-level physics?</p>
<p>I admittedly don’t know much about the undergraduate physics landscape in the Ivy League. But the faculty at my school always claim that upperclassmen that excel there could excel at any Ivy as undergrads, even Columbia.</p>
<p>I could do some research about the quality of physical research performed at Columbia (and, by extension, the quality of its graduate program) on my own, though. But I think graduate-level educational quality doesn’t correlate that well to undergraduate educational quality.</p>
<p>I can’t shake the feeling that I could have had a better education if I was surrounded with great students at the onset (I think that Columbia’s selectivity allows it to get entering classes made up of great students) rather than having to wait for the three-semester sifting to occur to get to the point where everyone around me in class is at my level.</p>