<p>Wow okay...I was just getting excited about living in a quad and having 15 floormates, but apparently they made a housing mistake and the girl I was supposed to room with had requested a roommate. Now I'll be rooming with the assigned roommate of my requested roommate's roommate. Haha. My new room is Reid 731. Sorry to bother you again, but do you know what Reid is like?</p>
<p>reid is just one long hall with regular doubles, odd-numbered rooms face broadway (you'll have a nice view! and not as much street noise as the lower floors!), even-numbered rooms face the quad. i don't know if the bathrooms on that floor in reid are renovated, but you can always just go around the corner and use the bathrooms in sulz or brooks.
really, dont worry about knowing everything about your dorm. just get excited for meeting your roommate and all your new friends!</p>
<p>hey stillbits! I'd just like to commend you for taking time out to answer our questions so honestly. (it's very admirable!)</p>
<p>i was just wondering, after going through your years at barnard, do you regret coming to barnard? you mentioned that barnard was stingy, but where you happy with whatever aid you received? you mentioned that some of the buildings (especially the tunnels) where quite dilapidated (and that leak in the bay window).. does that change your view of the school (values and otherwise) much?</p>
<p>and one last question that you might not be able to answer... i live in new york city but if i go to barnard, i really want to dorm in the quad. so my question is, will barnard give me enough aid so that i can dorm at school? or will i have to pay for dorming myself?</p>
<p>I certainly welcome the boosterism for Barnard but I can't let anti-Columbia slander slide, stillbits12. You can't claim you're merely delineating two perspectives on education and then go on to disparage the Columbia Core. </p>
<p>To prospective parents who may be considering the differences between Columbia and Barnard- while Barnard has a more intimate campus and more "nurturing" advising, this has nothing to do with class sizes. Barnard, like Columbia, has its share of massive lectures. And Columbia's Core classes are exclusively small, intimate seminars of no more than 20 students. Additionally, the limited perspective stillbits12 has on the Core (anecdotes related to her by a CC friend) fail to tell the whole story; of course a student would consider his or her Core education "superficial" if he or she failed to do all the reading! That is the student's fault, not Columbia's. Nor are all of us yearning to escape the "long, boring" Core; it's one of the fundamental reasons people choose to attend Columbia. In any case, Barnard students certainly do not manage to read most of the Core books (of which, by the way, Canterbury Tales is not a set part) in their first year classes alongside all others while Columbia students supposedly struggle with them!</p>
<p>Hi princess, no I don't regret coming to Barnard at all. Like I said, all colleges have their downsides, and the faults that Barnard has are not that different from other colleges. While it might be stingy in providing adequately maintained facilities, the real "treasure", so to speak, is within the classrooms and is intangible. I find that I am more than satisfied with the coursework and what I have learned from Barnard professors and Barnard's philosophy, so the less than satisfying conditions of Barnard's infrastructure doesn't overshadow those aspects at all. And I think that if you talk to many other students, you'll find that yes, they have their gripes about the college's policies or bureaucracy, but they'll follow those gripes with how amazing their classes and professors are. And really, isn't that what you're going to college for? :)</p>
<p>As for Aid, no I have not qualified ever for Aid, which is a bitter topic between my parents and I. (The only saving me right now is the free housing as an RA.) I am, however, in a very special situation, which I don't feel comfortable discussing here. And I don't know much about Financial Aid and how much they really give to each student. I only know that my friend, whose parents make about $80,000 a year, gets about 60-70% of her Aid covered. But she was also in a special situation her first year, so don't take that as a typical aid package. And I also wouldn't know about FinAid giving aid to NYC students. I think that they might factor in the fact that you could easily commute and that your opting to live on campus would be a "luxury", but again, I'm not sure. Sorry for my lack of information in this department!</p>
<p>Hi, columbia2007- Thanks for bringing another perspective into the thread. While I admit that my familiarity with the Core Curriculum is limited, I have never wanted to give others the impression that Barnard is a more intimate and nurturing environment solely due to class size (far from it!). I have acknowledged throughout this thread that classes are cross-registered so that students can take both large and small classes from both colleges. And when I mentioned the required first-year classes, I also pointed out that it was MY courses in particular which had a similar curriculum as a LitHum class. First-year English classes are also small, intimate seminars, by the way. And aside from LitHum, I'm pretty sure Barnard students can register for any ArtHum or other "Hum" classes they want to, of course, priority being given to CC students first. I apologize if I have given a wrong impression of how CC students feel about the Core Curriculum, but my goal was to point out the flexibility and freedom that came with Barnard's Nine Way of Knowing philosophy.</p>
<p>Both good points, Stillbits and Columbia2007, with regards to the differences in the core curriculum of Columbia vs. Barnard's Nine Ways. My kid is one who actually thought at first that she would have enjoyed the Core had she attended Columbia. She loves classical literature, etc. However, now that she has discovered her major (never dreamed she would choose a science major....which I am sure she would NOT have done if she was not a Barnard student), she would be very, very frustrated by the limitations that the Core curriculum would be placing upon her right now with regards to scheduling. The "Nine Ways", however, allow for a fairly fluid framework into which a personalized curriculum can be designed (neuroscience/dance, for example...).</p>
<p>As for "Barnard boosterism", since this is the Barnard board, methinks that is probably forgivable as long as things are presented reasonably, right :) ?</p>