<p>Never thought I'd air out such personal feelings on a forum, but here goes. And I especially want the Columbia faculty/staff kids to weigh in. </p>
<p>For the longest time I've been pushed to apply/attend Columbia because I get free tuition (and only recently did I know this, nearly guaranteed acceptance). One of my parents works as a professor there, and in my time I've come to realize the uneasy truth that, well, I don't like Columbia or New York City all that much. I can list some of my reasons: the core, the lack of undergrad focus, the huge student body, and the red tape are a few. Yet, I still applied at my parents' behest and now that I've gotten in (yay!) I'm struggling to find the strength to turn it down (..oh, well then).</p>
<p>Part of me does not want to be in the same city as half of my family. Especially my mother, who freely fantasized having lunches with me every week (as I stared at her with horror). I see college as a time to reexamine how I define myself and explore new possibilities, away from my relatives' and classmates' ideas of who I am. I see New York City as something that will engulf me, based on my impersonal experiences alone, and being so near to the people who've known me all my life... makes me feel trapped. Columbia is a great school for many, but all I see is a college experience that will make me lose sight of myself. </p>
<p>Admittedly, Columbia could still be good for me. I have a lot of guilt, too, for seeming so ungrateful for such an amazing opportunity to go to an Ivy for free and I confess, for trying to run away from my state and family. Yet.. I do get half tuition at any other school, too.</p>
<p>So this sucks. Am I a complete idiot to turn down free tuition to Columbia? (Answer that one gently please.) Are there any professors' kids out there who've gone through a similar decision? </p>
<p>Do you really, truly believe you can’t re-examine yourself while still having lunch with your mom once a week? Really? That’s horror to you? No offense intended but that’s pretty immature.This whole argument is. </p>
<p>College is often the time when you start forming a real working relationship with your parents outside the home.This is no longer the “drop me off two blocks from the mall” age. Grow up. And trust me, having a support system around is nothing to sneeze at. You don’t me give the impression that your parents are overly intrusive (once a week? You’re not italian that’s for sure…) so I really don’t see the problem. </p>
<p>The issue I have -though I may very well be wrong here- is that everything in your rationale (Core, NY, etc…) seems to be an excuse for “zomg, i would like die if i ran into my mom”.This isn’t like being the child of the principal. It’s highly unlikely that you will even run into your parent or be in their building, let alone class, if you’re not in their department.</p>
<p>And in other news: 42,000$ a year. You’ve given no argument to go against that. In this economy? That is a selfish decision. Pure and simple. That money could go to grad school. CU professors don’t make -that- much. Think of other factors than your My Chemical Romance teenage angst.</p>
<p>You want to be an independent adult in clothes only but what you’ve given us here here reads like a junior high blog.</p>
<p>I am a professor’s kid. I will most likely choose Columbia even though I have the option of Yale or Princeton. </p>
<p>I think we’re coming from very different perspectives though. My parents are willing to send me to these other schools, but I don’t want to go. I love New York. I love Columbia. I am not afraid of being close to home. I loved my time in NYC and I’ll love spending more time here.</p>
<p>I also worry about being trapped, but I fear something else: In NYC, I feel free to go and do whatever I want. I have a huge world I can connect with, and dozens of friends from all different social circles. In a place like Yale or Princeton, I’ll be stuck in a small town with only other students for company. The cities/towns will quickly exhaust themselves. There are greater luxuries in those places, but they’ll never match what I can find in NYC.</p>
<p>And of course, Columbia itself is wonderful. It’s alive. Every time I’m there, I find crowds of students outside talking and chatting. I did not see this at Yale (I haven’t seen Princeton since summer). It was like a ghost town. The place felt deserted, empty, and very lonely. I’m choosing Columbia not because of the money (though God knows I’m happy about that), but because I want to be where I’ve always been happy.</p>
<p>leaving the city is not a bad idea, and i think people understand the impulse. I am with Bigstan because i think about one of my best friends in ugrad whose parents were faculty members. On the one hand yes they were around and the other fac members knew who he was. But ultimately Columbia is a place that is not all consuming in one area and once you leave that classroom you are just a Columbia student and not Bill’s son, and people will treat you like it. By his senior year few people really thought of his parents and he didn’t go and hang out with them as much as it was in the beginning - his mom let go. And if you ask him, he really grew into his own because he was in NYC.</p>
<p>If you really don’t like Columbia than you can turn it down for your sake, don’t turn it down because you want to get back at your parents for pushing you, don’t do it because you have some thing against the rents. But it is a pretty incredible place and with free tuition (aka no parental complaining about how much they are spending on you) you might actually find it more liberating.</p>
<p>Before I go into what I think, I really have to address LionHeaded’s rudeness, given the fact that I was genuinely asking for help, not abuse. What is your problem? I get that you’re angry I won’t have to pay to attend Columbia—the school you desperately want to make love to, as you’ve made pretty clear in the forums, but rehashing the reasons why I’m still considering Columbia or making uncalled for judgments on my maturity and taste in music isn’t going to give me new perspective or much help with my decision. I can see how, well, boneheaded my original post is and how much of a tool I look (thanks again admissionsgeek), but again, it wasn’t an invitation for insecure CU groupies to come out and play. Thanks for the effort though; it must have taken a lot of time to take the mickey on someone you’re just afraid of resembling.</p>
<p>But onto the substance of what all of you said… now that I think about it, having a support system would be a great thing to have around, and yea, having my family around won’t preclude me from “finding myself.” I’ve already dreamt of all the possibilities free tuition could give me, but the uneasy feeling remains, that same one that prompted me to post the original topic, whenever I imagine saying no to my top choice or Columbia. Thanks for everybody’s input—honestly now—especially LionHeaded, who basically wrote out what the CU student in me has been shouting. Once I’m back from visit season, I’ll hopefully have a conclusive decision on my hands, and I’ll post that to help out any other professors’ kids in the same dilemma.</p>
<p>+1 - LionHeaded, your tone is uncalled for. Amaryllis has legitimate concerns and what might seem obvious to your perspective isn’t necessarily so obvious to others who come from different personal stories. </p>
<p>However, I would tend to agree that staying and being near your parents might not be as bad of a thing as you might think. You will still have a lot of autonomy and a lot of newfound freedom which naturally comes with being an adult and college student. Think about what your relationship with your parents was like 4 years ago compared to today. Do you think that your relationship with your parents will stay like it is today for the next four years? Of course not. It’s constantly changing and you will naturally gain more and more freedom and independence. I can understand the horror of a parent wanting to eat lunch with you at college, but in time you may even grow to appreciate these moments rather than spurn them. Your parents won’t be around forever, after all. Plus, you’ll still get their guidance in times when it’s actually helpful, and they’re still there to bail you out if you do something really stupid or make a huge mistake.</p>
<p>I love how Lionhead and CU2002’s posts always bring out these sides in people. Say what you want, they cut through the bull. :D</p>
<p>And I was going to post on how LH’s tone was uncalled for but you just basically proved most of what he said right.</p>
<p>My advice would be similar to that already posted- though I would also make the argument of maturity ( in a much less abrasive way). You just sound very…young. Perhaps too young to make such an expensive decision yourself. I would consult not just your parents but also school counselors. Maybe research Columbia in terms of your major and NY work opportunities; not just the core and <em>ahem</em> mom lunches. The grad school argument is a very valid one.</p>
<p>Keep in mind…You asked for opinion, not advice. And the thing about this board is that you get answers ranging from the overly polite to the brutally blunt. That’s just how it is. If you’re gonna start flaming, please make entertaining- both of you. (Honestly ‘Boneheaded’? Dude…)</p>
<p>I think for professor’s kid, it would always be “did I get in on my own merit?” even when it’s the case. Palo Alto send a large number of students to Stanford, but many of them are professor’s kids. Having your family in the same city may feel it’s too close for comfort now, but you’ll appreciate it when you get sick and you could go home easily for a few days. As an adult, you will also learn to set boundary with your family - how to politely tell your mother you could have lunch with her every other week, but not every week. There is always opportunity to study abroad to get away from NYC for a while. Columbia is a world class school, it’s not for everyone, but for a free ride it would be very hard to turn down for anyone.</p>
<p>I think I sympathize with your plight more than some of the others here (although don’t hate too much on LionHeaded - he’s usually quite reserved and you both probably deserved nicer from each other). I grew up in Boston, took evening classes at Harvard, high school classes at MIT (plus Splash/HSSP), and you couldn’t have paid me enough to attend either place. It was just too darn close to home. For me, Columbia was a close balance, just far enough away that nobody would be looking over my shoulder, but not so far that I couldn’t go home easily and cheaply.</p>
<p>Obviously this is seriously confounded by the issue of money. You’re talking about a difference of $80,000, post-tax (possibly as much as $120,000 pretax income), for the sake of not being “too close to home”. And I think that’s what your reservations boil down to… let me look at them a little closer:</p>
<p>
Not liking NYC: I can’t read your mind, but this may be more just not liking what’s familiar, than not really being a city person at heart. Most people living in other cities in the US would like to live in New York, all else being equal, and most New Yorkers are very happily self-satisfied with where they live. If you’re the type who just can’t stand all the hustle and want to be among the trees and to drive 30 mins to get anywhere, well, point taken. But you may find that having grown up among the 24-hour subway lines, the cafes and restaurants everywhere, the cultural institutions and every little thing down to the free canoe rentals in riverside park in the summer… well, that all ain’t so bad. Imagine if NYC weren’t “where you grew up” and “where your parents are” but rather just another city. Would you still really object to living there for 4 years? What if it were London, or San Francisco? If any of those sound appealing, maybe it’s not New York so much as being around your parents.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The Core: There’s a couple of ways to look at it. On the one hand, it means you have fewer electives. On the other hand, (1) It means you have something in common with all your classmates, something to talk about or something to meet people at, and (2) It’s a curriculum carefully designed over nearly 100 years to make smart people more educated. You may have read Pride and Prejudice and the Aeneid and the Federalist Papers and Locke while growing up, you may not, but discussing the foundational works of western culture leaves you with a command of the common threads within our society and that of Europe, and the ability to recognize and use some of the philosophical ideas to your advantage. Sure, at (say) Brown you could get away taking underwater basket weaving, but looking back, would you really think that was a good use of your time? The Core isn’t asking you to learn something useless (well, except Frontiers of Science, but that’s getting better), and for your effort, you end up literally feeling more educated. That’s some real value. Oh, and (3) You actually do have some choices there, like what culture to use to fill your Major Cultures requirement, or what language to study to meet that. Basically, I didn’t know anyone at Columbia who, having completed the Core, felt that it was a waste of time or didn’t like it in retrospect.</p></li>
<li><p>Lack of Undergrad Focus: Perhaps by comparison to a Dartmouth or Amherst, but Columbia is certainly far better at this than other major research universities. The Core is partial proof of this, as I keep saying, but so is the bounty of research opportunities available to undergraduates, all of the Helprooms for various subjects (staffed by paid grad students), and all of the parties and events that the university throws for undergraduates. Do they shower love and affection on you quite the same way as Pomona College? Maybe not, but they’re not that far off either.</p></li>
<li><p>The Huge Student Body: Seriously? Boston University is a big school, it has 18,733 undergraduates. University of Michigan has 26,000. Those have a big student body. Columbia has about 5300 undergraduates between the College and the Engineering school. Dartmouth has 4200, Princeton has 5000… Harvard has 6700. Honestly, Columbia isn’t that big. Walking around campus from class to class, you will run into people you know every day. If a friend calls, you’re never more than a 5-minute walk from being able to meet up. This is not a huge, impersonal kind of place.</p></li>
<li><p>The Red Tape: Guilty at least to some degree. It’s gotten a lot better since the 80s, from what I’ve gathered. Some things run like clockwork (the registrar produces transcripts on the spot and mails them on request for free within 24 hours; the housing lottery is pretty efficient; Professors are pretty accessible), and a few things need some work (There’s some unnecessary paperwork when “applying for the degree”, or trying to get a new club funded, for example). But on the whole it’s not nearly as bad as its reputation.</p></li>
</ul>
<hr>
<p>Look, like some of the other posters here, I had friends and classmates who were children of professors too. And most of them just kept their families at arm’s reach. Living in the dorms, eating in the dining hall, going to classes, you really never have to take yourself out of the campus culture if you don’t want to. I knew some non-professorially-related kids who just happened to grow up on the Upper West Side too, and aside from one who took his laundry home every weekend, they all pretty much just used that to their advantage (throwing parties, an occasional home-cooked meal) and never bowed to pressure. Basically, your parents will get over it. After a few months, you being “near” but not present in their lives will become the new reality, and the nagging will stop.</p>
<p>As you observe, college is a great place to grow up and prove yourself to be an adult capable of functioning in the real world. What I’m saying is that it’s possible to do that even if “Home” is only a few blocks away. As long as you’re making your own life on campus, it’ll still feel like your own life.</p>
<p>…and lastly, there’s still the money. I’m sure you’ve had jobs growing up, so you have some idea of what it takes to earn a couple hundred dollars or even a couple thousand dollars. We’re talking about your parents (and you) earning or borrowing a hundred thousand dollars or so, to cover attending college somewhere else. Think of the number of vacations they wouldn’t be able to take, or the car repairs they’d defer, or the nice restaurant dates they might prefer, and so on, for the sake of giving you that privilege. And they’d probably do it, too, if you asked them firmly enough. But you may want to consider that your relationship with them, long term, will be a whole lot better if you don’t insist that they make that sacrifice, and instead try to see the good in living, well, not at home, but nearby. Trust me, it really doesn’t suck.</p>
<p>Does Columbia have a tuition exchange program with their employees? I believe that this allows a child of an employees to go to another college that participates, at the same benefits as Columbia. May be worth looking into.</p>
<p>I can’t add much, without annoyingly repeating other posts… but what I will say is that when you do look into going to other colleges, don’t end up choosing your college based on why you DONT want to go to the others ones (kind of the approach you’ve taken to looking at columbia). In other words, try not to choose by a process of elimination. choose the college you want to go to based on the merits of that college and not the faults of other ones. Eg. dont go to duke cus you don’t like columbia’s core, go cus you like its XYZ programme. </p>
<p>and even then, to be entirely honest, you can do as much research as you like, but you won’t fully know what its like to go to X university until you’re actually there… as a wise man once put it, trying to imagine what its like to be a college student when you aren’t one is like trying to imagine what its like to be a bat (or something along those lines)… </p>
<p>final words though, you’re absolutely right when you say university is the place to examine how you define yourself. but even if you do end up in columbia, this can be done… even if your family is 5 feet away.</p>
<p>In fact, children of faculty get half-off on the tuition at all other schools. I am also quite conflicted - I am facing a full-ride at Columbia versus a half-ride at Harvard. Proximity to home is one concern.</p>
<p>Thanks again to all who replied. I still agree that having half my family around should probably be considered a good thing, especially in a city like New York.</p>
<p>In hindsight, my original post should have been along these lines: Since I was small, my family and I have imagined I would go to Columbia, but if I’m completely honest with myself, I probably wouldn’t have given Columbia a second look during my app process, if it weren’t for the tuition, and it clearly sticks out from the rest. I have absolutely nothing against Columbia, and I’m sure that I would be OK there, as well as really OK in the financial aid dept. However, the pressure that my parents have put upon me to choose Columbia and disregard many of my initial apps (Reed, Skidmore, Oberlin, Wesleyan, etc.) has bred a little resentment within me to pick a school I wouldn’t be interested in otherwise. I guess my question really should have been… what would you guys do in the same situation? I know you love Columbia, but imagine another school that seems completely opposite to your preferences. Would prestige and money convince you to go against your gut?</p>
<p>In any case, I apologize to LionHeaded (as well as that ref to admissionsgeek). If not with a lot of tact, at least you showed me how selfish my thought process had been. Yet, I still can’t make a decision confidently, and I’ll update once May 1st rolls around.</p>
<p>Renaissance-- Good luck with your decision. That sounds tough.</p>
<p>Amarylls, i completely understand which is why i was kind of weirded out by your retort and reference. if you really don’t want cu, don’t go. </p>
<p>i was in a similar situation facing fac benefit v. columbia and chose columbia because i think it was best for me. your last post at least gives some hint at the fact that you have a desire for a small liberal LAC environment. i think you should follow your gut, but also be prepared for some rather difficult conversations with parents who are footing the actual bill. they are stake holders in this situation as well.</p>