<p>Can any SEAS student give me their opinion on the non-technical requirements of the core? Was it useful or did you just put up with it?</p>
<p>Also, does Columbia have its share of hardcore engineers? I wouldn't like to go to an engineering school where no one was dead set on engineering.</p>
<p>I’ve had my ups and downs with the core–I very much enjoyed university writing, but I made some bad choices for global core (aka taking Islam with all the religion majors and not wanting to put forth the necessary effort for an A). If you research classes before hand and get insight from upperclassman, your core experience with nontechs can be very fulfilling. At the very least, they keep your reading and writing skills sharp in case you’d like to pursue an alternative career path down the road. </p>
<p>There are plenty of hardcore engineers–in fact, I’d say a majority are hardcore engineers, but simply with broader interests than your typical engineering school. While most of the IE/OR students tend to be more interested in networking for the sake of networking, and getting a good GPA so they can get a good job in finance, the rest of the disciplines tend to have pretty intense engineering students. Columbia’s engineering curriculum is less applied than other programs, with an emphasis on theoretical understanding. If anything, this is beneficial because you’ll be prepared mentally for both research, hard engineering jobs, or softer jobs in consulting, business, medicine, etc.</p>
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<p>What exactly do you mean by this? No projects or research?</p>
<p>Not at all, if anything it means a broader range of research activities available. Engineering professors complete both theoretical and experimental research, and students complete a senior design project that is completely applied. All I meant by this is at a typical top engineering school, the education is usually slanted toward learning ways to directly apply science to developing technology. Here, many engineering classes seek to teach you how to think about the science and how it might be applied in various settings. Essentially, it doesn’t require you to specialize the way you think about an engineering discipline during your undergraduate education. There is a lot of interdepartmental communication in the engineering school at Columbia–for example, the chemical engineering department will collaborate with everything from materials science to environmental engineering. </p>
<p>I honestly don’t think you need to worry about the number of hardcore engineers attending Columbia, there are plenty.</p>