From a current freshman in SEAS: a few misconceptions about Columbia

<p><em>bump</em>bump*</p>

<p>This is more of an application question. </p>

<p>One of the prompts is: Please tell us what you found meaningful about one of the above mentioned books, publications or cultural events.</p>

<p>Does the cultural events include movies?
This question has been asked before but I haven’t found a definite answer yet. One person from a thread did write Columbia “is an intellectual institution, so they probably wouldn’t include movies unless they are foreign”?</p>

<p>Follow up question is: lets say you are French and the “foreign movie” you choose is a French movie. Does that look bad because for you that movie isn’t really foreign?</p>

<p>For that prompt, I assumed that “above mentioned” meant that as long as you chose something you mentioned in one of the short answers that was fine. If you mentioned the movie, I see no reason why it wouldn’t be fine. </p>

<p>Also, I wrote about a book I read, so I don’t have any readily available anecdotal evidence about someone writing about a movie that wasn’t foreign, but I legitimately do not see why you couldn’t do that. </p>

<p>And regarding the French bit, I’ll repeat what I said before. I think it should be perfectly fine. I wrote about Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok, and it was published just last year–so, I mean, if that means anything, the book was in no regards a classic.</p>

<p>If I understand the issue, it’s that Columbia first asks you to list your favorite books, publications, films, exhibitions, etc. but then asks you (in a question that wasn’t on the app 2 years ago) to to write in more detail about one of the “above-mentioned books, publications, or cultural events.” </p>

<p>Obviously the second questions doesn’t explicitly include the word “films,” but I think it’s pretty clear that you’re expected to write about one of the things you listed above, which can include films. There’s no reason that Columbia would want not want you to write about a film if you listed it above along with other “cultural events” like exhibitions. I think they just didn’t want to turn the second question into a laundry of terms (“books, publications, films, exhibitions, etc.”).</p>