<p>I've loved Columbia - the thought of living in the City, the diversity of majors in SEAS, the Core, and the overall richness of the school - since like sophmore year, but I've been learning a lot about WashU and I'm starting to like it as well.</p>
<p>SO, I'm in at WashU and I got a likely letter from Columbia. I'll be visiting both schools in April for the first time. </p>
<p>Some considerations:
Major - ChemE, Applied Math, CEE [which WashU doesn't have], or Operations Research/Systems
Minor - a humanities field like Comparative Literative or Philosophy</p>
<p>Columbia should be a no-brainer unless you absolutely can’t stand new york city. We have a good engineering school with a strong undergrad focus. All the majors you listed have solid enrollment at Columbia. Chem E is hardcore and weeds out a lot of kids. APMA takes some really smart kids and is well populated because the curriculum is flexible. OR is the cop out major in seas (it’s still more rigorous than most College majors), but if you do decently in OR wall street placement is great. The civil and environmental departments have profs who do great research on international development, sustainability and environmental protection. </p>
<p>SEAS is an engineering school that’s practically focused, some of the classes might be theoretical to give students a strong base, but research is geared to solving the worlds current problems, like creating cheap and energy efficient lighting devices, manipulating carbon sequestration sources, cheaper bio-fuels, more efficient water management systems, micro batteries, more efficient ways of electrifying rural areas in poor countries. If you are serious about engineering you have many opportunities to do research under a prof. I don’t know anyone who has failed at finding research work. I’m in the engineering school, am nothing spectacular, and was able to find a research job on campus within a few weeks of searching. </p>
<p>If you aren’t really interested in doing engineering or research for a living but were to go into finance, law, medicine or politics columbia is one of the best springboards you could find. If you aren’t interested in any of this, take solace that Columbia is all round strong and attracts a truly diverse (almost exhaustive) array of kids who want to pursue these and other fields.</p>
<p>For those potential minors you have good departments, turn out and competition in columbia college.</p>
<p>confidentialcoll: Thank you for all of the insight! In terms of research and focus, Columbia is incredible. And it also has a very strong and involved Engineers Without Borders, which is important to me. </p>
<p>Honestly, my ONLY qualm is that if I decide that I’m not interested in a SEAS major and want to study say environmental biology or sustainable development in the College, I have to apply as a transfer student to the College, right? I doubt that I would because I’m interested in a lot of what SEAS offers but you never know.</p>
<p>^yes you do, but most seas kids who want to transfer for whatever reason usually get in. There are kids who want to do pure in stead of applied physics/math, some want to do econ-OR instead of OR, some wanted to do pure bio/chem instead of bme/chem e. If you have a good reason and a decent gpa it shouldn’t be too difficult. Basically if you do want to keep the transfer option open maintain a good gpa freshman year. Honestly few people end up transferring, because you can still graduate having taken a majority of your classes in the college.</p>
<ul>
<li>Generally reputed to have a more cohesive campus community with more ‘school spirit’, whatever that’s worth. hooray pompoms.</li>
<li>If you’re looking to do “traditional” engineering work once you get your degree - we’re talking working for the Boeings and Lockheed Martins of the world - WashU likely does better with placement.</li>
</ul>
<p>Columbia - and specifically SEAS - is very good at job placement for wall street/finance, management consulting, entrepreneurial startups, and top tech firms like Microsoft and Google. Many graduates of ‘harder’ engineering disciplines end up with jobs like Biochem research labs or startups (ChemE), structural engineering firms (CivilE), etc… but I can’t argue that they do better at that than top engineering programs.</p>
<p>SEAS is a top general education (focused on science and engineering), at a top school. That is not the same as being a top engineering education. Frankly, I wanted the former much more than the latter, but I know people at Drexel who looked down their nose at Columbia and are loving life at (say) Lucent now. </p>
<p>It’s worth mentioning just so we don’t all sound like huge homers here. I do kind of wonder what the WashU people had to say for themselves.</p>