Does columbia have the traditional college feel?

Colleges & Universities A-Z Columbia University
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<p>Birds singing, green lawns, nice college town, peaceful scenery? Not that it will change my mind about matriculating there since academia is my main criterion but just wondering if the cake has any icing...</p>

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<p>birds - yes, even hawks!
morningside heights as a college town - quirky cafe’s, bookstores, yes?
green lawns - source of urban campus pride, better in the early fall and late spring, some nearby parks add to it
peaceful scenary - places that you can just be alone, sakura park, riv park, morningside park, and a number of lookout spots, um - its pretty good.</p>

<p>consider it an urban replica of a traditional college.</p>

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<p>All of the above. Yes. </p>

<p>My favorite memory of Days On Campus was sitting on the lawn with a few other prospies, looking out at the campus. Birds were singing, little kids were merrily playing on the lawn, etc. </p>

<p>And walk from Columbia’s campus to St. John’s Cathedral. Tell me that the tranquility in NYC doesn’t absolutely blow you away. Visiting that sold me on Morningside Heights as a college town.</p>

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<p>Thanks for asking this! I was wondering the same thing.</p>

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<p>Wow, some people are drinking the Kool-Aid. Columbia’s as good a campus as you’ll get for an urban college, but it’s no Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, etc.</p>

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<p>ROFL, where in LA are you from such that you’re blown away by the tranquility of walking along this 6-lane highway to the church:</p>

<p><a href=“http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Amsterdam_Avenue_-_Columbia_University_-_north.jpg[/url]”>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Amsterdam_Avenue_-_Columbia_University_-_north.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Uhh…Amsterdam ain’t really a highway when there are lights every few feet. Relatively speaking, it’s pretty calm. There are streets in LA that would put Amsterdam to shame.</p>

<p>Like:
<a href=“http://laist.com/attachments/la_zach/sepulveda-westchester.jpg[/url]”>http://laist.com/attachments/la_zach/sepulveda-westchester.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Columbia2002, are you trying to say Harvard has a less urban campus than Columbia??? Have you spent any time near Harvard Square? Columbia is a much more serene environment than Harvard (based on my time as a student at Harvard vs. my time with my son at Columbia). Spend a few minutes on Mass Ave in front of the Harvard campus vs. a few minutes on Broadway or Amsterdam in front of the Columbia campus.</p>

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<p>As a prospective student I would say its totally and completely different. This is both Columbia’s strength and weakness. First, the campus is very small compared to other Ivies, so you would have trouble limiting yourself to the campus. And while the city around it isn’t crazy, its pretty busy with people who are and aren’t associated with the school everywhere.</p>

<p>The entire niche Columbia fills is that its in New York City. If you’d rather be in a classic college town, you probably won’t be happy there. But if you love the city, you could definitely make a great case for it over schools like HYP.</p>

<p>Because of the small size of the campus, youre probably going to be out and around the city a good deal on a regular basis (as opposed to at Princeton or Yale or Stanford or similar schools, where you can reasonably easily avoid the surroundings). While Morningside Heights has less crime and is more college-y than other parts of NYC, its still NYC.</p>

<p>The bottom line to me was that if you love the city and Columbia makes sense to you, absolutely go there. If you dont love the city, you might be happier someplace else with more green space or with a quieter atmosphere.</p>

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<p>

Any thoughts on UChicago as an urban campus? Or comparing Columbia’s and Chicago’s? I really loved Chicago’s campus when I visited, but I haven’t seen Columbia yet.</p>

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<p>hi dlee - feel free to pm me, i attend uchicago for grad school and went to columbia for ugrad; i don’t think you can quite compare the two. and i’d say without question i’d prefer columbia’s campus/city dynamic. uchicago is more of a suburb, and its relative isolation to chicago’s downtown affirms that.</p>

<p>i’d gladly help persuade you toward columbia :)</p>

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<p>No, I can tell you with absolute certainty, Columbia does not have a traditional college feel. First off, a “traditional” college feel, to me, entails a strong community and contained campus (and to a further extent sports, which is less universal so we’ll stick to these two).</p>

<p>One of my best friends goes to Columbia, and upon visiting him, I realized the school is VERY individualistic. He barely knew the people next door to him, let alone his hall. This held true for all his suite-mates as well. People had their groups, but there was very little sense of community. Coming from Duke, where everyone knows everyone, it was shocking. Community is a big part of traditional life that Columbia lacks.</p>

<p>The contained campus idea stems from what kids do on campus. When you walk around, do you see a ton of people, or is it more frequent that people are off campus. At Columbia, people just went off into the city and used the small campus as a sort of home base. The city was their place to hang out. At Duke, people walk around and have fun on campus. People see one another and do stuff together. I feel having a vibrant campus is essential to the traditional college feel.</p>

<p>If you love Columbia, great, but I personally felt alone when I visited. When I came back to Duke, it was much more communal, much more inclusive, much more traditional. I think that if you love, not like, the city then Columbia would be for you. Yet if you have a suburban background, then I think you may miss a lot in the city. Columbia University in the City of New York is just that, in the city.</p>

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<p>Chicago used to be my favorite, before it waitlisted me…:frowning:
I’ve been living in a metropolis for my whole life, and I love it. But I don’t know if I’d want a change of air. New York is indeed one of the greatest cities, but it can be daunting, too.</p>

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<p>this one time i visited…</p>

<p>anecdotes are not always successful because they pull apart individual experiences as metonymy. a tall task especially when the anecdote given is not true.</p>

<p>so i guess to the OP and other interested parties. consider who to trust on this issue. i think if you see my posts of course i love columbia, but i am not willing to call it anything other than what it is. sure columbia is INDIVIDUALISTIC, but it is also very much about community, especially now more than ever because of the kind of student columbia admits and the expectations they have about going to columbia (they want a community feel).</p>

<p>few people run out into the city every chance they get. 80-90% of the time you will spend (if you’re an avg. student, to those that wish to gorge on the city you can be that person too) will be on campus, studying, eating and participating.</p>

<p>this farce of a notion that some how columbia is full of silo’d individuals operating alone is cute, but ultimately not true. the folks at columbia are very social and the climate at columbia (people very near each other) makes your natural curiosity beacon, you really get to know your hall/suitemates in a rather peculiar way. my preferred activity would be to go door to door in the suites to see how folks what folks were upto, make plans for the week, grab someone to go have dinner, learn about what they were studying (i remember the first time i learned about material science), and they would do the same, come around, bother, laugh, share. my experience is far from unique or even rosy in this department, but when you go to school where folks are regularly waking up at 5am and others regularly going to sleep at 5am, there is always someone to chat with, do something with, and yes procrastinate.</p>

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<p>what about people who’re not into parties? lol</p>

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<p>It depends how you define the “traditional college feel,” in my opinion. If you define it as an insular, forced community that rallies around sports, then of course Columbia does not have that kind of “traditional college feel.” The Columbian social scene is not unlike the Manhattan social scene: everyone is at least capable of being on their own, and form fluid social groups that do things together. Some people go downtown a lot, others frequent MoHi bars, others hang out in their suites a lot. As an individual, you can hang out in a friend’s room one night and the next meet up with some of your classmates to go to a play downtown. There is not much of a campus-wide monoculture, though there is a sense of general commiseration and exclusiveness. While Columbians don’t get together to watch football games, they will all complain about studying for finals in Butler and all feel superior to Cornell, for instance. Of course, I’m a prospie, so take what I say with a grain of salt.</p>

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<p>It depends on how you define the traditional campus, but I feel that Columbia lacks it. A traditional campus usually has campus activities. A traditional campus feel, for me, usually means that students stay on campus to socialize and have fun inclusively, that is it’s not based solely on friend groups. The student councils put on study breaks and once a year activities such as Glass House Rocks and the Backyard BBQ. The campus fields are usually closed year-round, so don’t expect to have fun on the campus itself. As pwoods said, the campus life is essentially meeting in people’s rooms and talking or hanging out. </p>

<p>Columbia has space problems. There’s no student center and there are no suites to meet up in until you live in Hogan or EC as upperclassman. Ruggles does not count as a suite because there’s a 60 sq ft. kitchen and that’s it. You can go to people’s doubles or singles but hanging out with a group of friends is difficult in some of the more spacious lower-classman doubles - Carman is approximately 220 sq. ft. And if you want to drink with friends as an underclassman, watch out for the War on Fun. It’s definitely real since the number of alcohol related write-ups has gone from less than 10 in 2006 to over 180 in 2008. Lerner is not the greatest place to meet and have fun, since there’s very little to do there, and expect a lot of the lounges to be filled already, not that there are a huge number of lounges to begin with. </p>

<p>Therefore, the city is one the options to have fun and it’s great when you have time! Sure you’ll be spending most of your time on campus, but it’s doubtful that there’s enough room to really socialize. Trust me, I’ve thought about getting a cheap karoake machine, or getting rock band, but I can barely fit a TV and a fridge in my single. Seriously, let’s get real. There’s not a huge campus life and everyone leaves to have fun. If I can’t play ultimate on campus or find a suite to relax and play video games, I’m going out.</p>

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<p>the LLC was plenty of space to hang out in beard, i lived there for 3 years. had a lot of fun, and i am sure my view of campus is impacted by that fact. i also joined a fraternity, and played pool every wednesday night at the house. i played soccer every friday’s at baker field. i mean sure it is an ‘imitation’ of a traditional college life, but it is close enough. where columbia gets better is precisely because it has the city as an extra. i played pick-up soccer and basketball in riverside park all the time (it is literally a 5 min walk away). in the event that i would become a target in the War on Fun, i got to know public safety very well as a result, and if you develop a cordial relationship with them, it is like most things in life, things work out.</p>

<p>i mean each his own, i think that if you are creative in your thinking, you can make the most of columbia, nyc and appropriate what you want out of it - beyond the fact you’re getting a great education and learning a great deal from your peers. if you don’t, then i guess that is what you get. i am not surprised beard you have another pessimistic post about columbia.</p>

<p>i feel like consolidating them all into a thread - so we can all remember it is the view of one person.</p>

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<p>and one addendum - having spent the better part of my college life in Lerner, i kind of resent you saying “it isn’t a great place to hang out.” whether it was helping film things for CTV when it was just getting restarted, or having a club meeting in a boardroom, checking out the orchestra on tuesday nights practice, any number of student events, networking events, to learning how to meander through the maze of stairs and stairways, hanging out with Ben Stein during bacchanal, i mean, that building is a lot more fun than you give it credit.</p>

<p>i remember learning the code to lerner 6 before it got taken over by student affairs, and occassionally raiding catering’s overstock. oh memories.</p>

<p>so to other folks out there - take two opinions and weigh them. certainly there are a lot of beard like folks at columbia, and a lot of folks like me. you choose what kind of experience you want, but know that there are options beyond being a curmudgeon.</p>

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<p>I second what adgeek said. While there are a lot of opportunities at Columbia, there are serious restrictions on the social scene as well. While I don’t think that should discourage anyone from considering coming here or provide a justification for d****ey Duke students to criticize Columbia for stupid reasons, it is something to seriously consider.</p>

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<p>Wow admissionsgeek. I don’t think I’m being pessimistic. People don’t stay on campus. I don’t understand how you have any time for work given how you’re always in the city, taking advantage of everything, etc. I don’t need you do demean my posts by calling them overly pessimistic, given that most students don’t stay on campus to have fun. </p>

<p>Please all remember that your posts are the view of one person as well. I’m trying to temper your views with that of an average students, rather than the super-star “Columbia is awesome and I can do anything” attitude. Honestly, my friends and I don’t feel this way about Columbia, so don’t go around calling everyone overly pessimistic and uninformed. I wonder if you’re paid by the admissions committee to sound like an advertisement. How do you have the time to post just as frequently during reading week and finals?</p>