<p>Hey guys! I'm having a really really hard time deciding between these two universities and which one I'd want to apply early to, so can you guys gives me your opinions on why Columbia is better? I'm also posting this in the Brown forum to get opposing views. Thanks a lot!!</p>
<p>Brown: Tighter community feeling
Columbia: NYC</p>
<p>One reason to choose Columbia over Brown is if you find an already structured curriculum ,aka the core, quite interesting then by all means Columbia would be for you. If you’d rather explore your options much more then Brown might be a better fit. </p>
<p>Brown has a more hippy-ish, tree hugging, fashionista type of student body where Columbia has a more independent, tough as nails student body.</p>
<p>I do not go to any of these schools but if I had to choose I would choose Columbia because it is in the same city as Goldman Sachs. :D</p>
<p>^Being in the same city doesn’t get you in easier than Wharton or Harvard students. but we are a top 5 school for recruitment, some would argue #3.</p>
<p>There is ample room to explore academic options at Columbia. Two big pluses of Columbia are:</p>
<p>1) the core allows (forces) you to meet lots of kids out side your field of study
2) there is balance of interest at Columbia: lots of engineering kids, wall street wannabes, science geeks, math wizes, climate junkies and the majority of humanity and social science majors. At brown there is a super majority of humanity and social science majors. Brown is ridiculously liberal and idealistic, I nearly threw up when I visited (visited many times), you feel a stronger sense of imbalance politically than you at Columbia. The imbalance academically is not present at Columbia, but pronounced at Brown.</p>
<p>To address your concerns from the other thread, you make really great friends at Columbia, even if they don’t form within your first month there. I really feel like I’ve made some (many) amazing and close friendships which will weather time and circumstance. The suite parties at Columbia can get quite big: 20-40 people so if you go to these (and you’ll be invited to these) you’ll end up meeting tons of new people and making new friends contacts etc. Columbia has a compact but separated campus so the denisty of other college kids is very high and you meet your friends and their friends all the fcking time. Brown is a fun place, the people are more friendly but also more immature and naive/delusional. Columbia has it’s fair share of die hard realists, and people in general tend to be more mature (this has it’s disadvantage). whatever you do, visit the schools before you decide, this decision is literally life changing even through both are top notch places.</p>