<p>Let's say my school doesn't rank and my overall cumulative gpa is about 90%</p>
<p>However due to some stupid elective class and an AP english class </p>
<p>One of my overall averages during the FALL TERM my Junior year is 87.5
and an 87.2 one of the semesters of my Sophomore year.</p>
<p>My Math and Science classes are all above 90 (Except for one math class during my freshman year in which I recieved an 85)( Let's say I plan on applying to SEAS)</p>
<p>I pull off an SAT score of 2250+ with a 780+ in Math</p>
<p>and SAT 2 scores of 800 in Math 2c and 750 in chem and 730 in bio M(I took the Bio during my freshman year)</p>
<p>Would my scores and good grades in math and science classes ( Hypothetically I have good EC's) Offset those two averages?</p>
<p>Sorry for everything being jumbled up lol, also my school is an independent religious private school that doesn't rank. (I'm also only the 4th graduating class)(My school is fairly new)</p>
<p>Columbia will look at your overall record. I think your question is more properly: whether it hurts you that you apparently got low grades in some humanities classes. Columbia expects you to get good grades in everything, so it can’t be a good thing that you got a low grade in anything. And it’s impossible to quantify these sorts of things as there are no formulas or cut-offs.</p>
<p>agreed with c02. one thing to add. columbia certainly has the broad interest that you do well in everything, but the particular interest that you do well in your prospective area of study. so of course if you want to do seas it is good to know you do well there.</p>
<p>but i think you should know: if your gpa is an 87 and your math/sci is in the 90s that puts your humanities grades at straight b’s to b-'s. if it is normal for top students in your school to receive a few of those grades it will be understandable. however, in general, a history of b’s is probably going to be too big of a mountain to overcome.</p>
<p>my number one advice: get your butt in gear and destroy your humanities and other classes from here on out.</p>
<p>It doesn’t really matter what genre your ECs fall into. Someone could easily get into SEAS, provided they have the numbers, if they are a nationally-recognized visual artist.</p>
<p>My overall gpa is about 90.05% and it was the B in the humanities class and that elective class which caused my average for that term to drop (The term I recieved an 87). I will certainly work had to earn an A for the next term. Does it help that my school doesn’t rank?</p>
<p>columbia is smart enough to read beyond rank, they can figure out where top students score and where they don’t. so i wouldn’t say it changes anything materially, it just means they have to work harder to figure some stuff out.</p>
<p>admissionsgeek, I usually agree with you, but I don’t believe that the admissions folks place a great deal of weight on one’s academic interests, other than CC vs. SEAS. My well-rounded, clueless son expressed an interest in “physics or political science” when he applied to Columbia College. He will soon finish his first year at Columbia without having taken a single course in either department. Seriously, how can any 17 year-old have any clue about long-term academic interests, with only a high school sense of the answer? Does anyone really believe that the admissions folks spend more than a momentary glance at one’s “academic interests”? If they do, they should be forced to compare the admissions application with the end result. The correlation would be essentially random.</p>
<p>That strikes me as a bit of a blanket statement… your son isn’t necessarily the norm.</p>
<p>Although your post technically precludes me from having any knowledge on this matter (being that I am a high school student and therefore I don’t have a clue about any of my long-term academic interests) I would beg to differ. Just about every ivy league caliber applicant from my school has a very strong and specific passion related to an academic direction they want to pursue.</p>
<p>One of my friends on the HYPSM circuit is really interested in developing more advanced prosthetics (with a special interest in improving the interface between the brain and the prosthetic).</p>
<p>Another one of my friends wants to cure cancer. As whimsical as that may sound, this person has acquired an internship at a local medical center specializing in cancer research and has been working there for some time now, and has studied biology fiercely, way above and beyond anything they teach here at school. I have no question about this person’s resolve to further research in that field.</p>
<p>As for myself, I am interested in making videogames with specific purposes beyond simply providing entertainment, namely psychological study. Basically my idea is: there are 11 million people who willingly pay $15 a month to play World of Warcraft, why not employ this latent workforce in a useful capacity by making a game that actually does something with the terabytes of data on human decisions that these games generate. If that falls through I would love to work in the industry simply as a game creator. </p>
<p>Point being that I do think academic interests play a substantial role in the admissions process especially in context. I mean your son is no exception, by expressing interest in “physics or political science” his application was probably viewed in the context of someone searching for direction… and was evaluated accordingly. I think academic interests allow applicants to synergize their ECs/Test scores/Classes/Essays/any other thing relating to academic direction.</p>
<p>I’ll be sure to let you say “I told you so” if I end up as an English major though…</p>
<p>I don’t think this is right, either. Too many absolutes on this back and forth. There are different types of Ivy kids – some have one specific passion / direction, others have a couple different passions / directions that they want to pursue (and they aren’t necessarily related), others are generally intellectually curious, and some are entirely clueless. Even the people with well-defined passions / directions are susceptible to change.</p>
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<p>He may end up being a cancer researcher his entire life, or he may not. He may take a neuroscience class and find brain disorders interesting, and end up researching brain disorders his entire life. He may find out that he likes clinical things or that he doesn’t want to spend the next 40 years of his life in a lab and not have much human interaction, and decide to become a doctor. He may like the idea of $$ and pursue a science-related business career. The point is that he doesn’t need to take a 180 to do something other than cancer research his entire life, and he could go into other fields using his cancer research background as the basis and a segway.</p>
<p>hi pbr: i am not really making a guess here when i say that they care about your academic interests. i am saying this with the fact that adcoms have told me it matters, and reading stuff on the columbia website have confirmed this. and i think that this only makes sense because to an extent admissions at columbia and elsewhere are charged with trying to find students with a diverse array of interests to fill-up the many classes offered.</p>
<p>so for example: if the best 2000 students are all interested in studying economics, it would still not behoove columbia to admit all those students because it would create a huge imbalance in departments. columbia would have entire classes that are empty. so columbia admits students who apply and give the intention that they might major in underrepresented majors like the sciences, the arts. it is not that they will hold the student to this, but it gives them some assurance that they will continue to fill these classes. </p>
<p>regarding your question that this is just cursory: i think this is pretty much proven false by what i’ve heard from adcoms, and also based on a study on the university senate website that talks about admissions and how they recruit for sciences in the provost’s taskforce for undergraduate education - it is clear that columbia tracks and cares about what students write on their application, whether or not they become science majors and whether they graduate as a science major. the two things that i noticed from the data - 1) about the same number of students that say they want to major in science stays relatively constant, 2) approximately the same number of students end up in that major choice over short periods of time, 3) they also do a longitudinal study showing the changes in majors from 1986-2004 that demonstrates how some majors have grown and others declined, looking at number of majors and the relationship to prospective majors. </p>
<p>so this brings up the inevitable box-checking phenomenon. that is, the belief that some how checking the box for physics means that you will be admitted. in the end you have to prove to a degree that you actually have the necessary science background to truly be a physics major. that you have the requisite out of class interests that would demonstrate and verify that you are interested in possibly majoring in physics. so in the end, unless it is ‘you’ it probably is not an advantage to pretend otherwise. </p>
<p>in the end, once admitted, a student can and will do what they desire. some may find areas of study they had never heard of before that just sparks, others know what they want to do from day one. many students that didn’t think they’d ever major in economics soon gravitate to the major. columbia like any institution that cares about statistics will probably account for such deviations in their modeling. my guess is that the average student that notes they want to do a humanities major will end up being a humanities major. the example of your son of political science or physics: i would be curious if he chooses to major in something that is not a social science or a hard science. for my part - i put down as two of my three major choices, the two majors i ended up having. this is, however, despite the fact that i flirted with about 4 other majors in my first two years. the mean is a nasty thing.</p>
<p>Kukko, I readily admit that my son may not be the norm, but he certainly is normal within my family.</p>
<p>I entered an elite LAC many years ago thinking I was was “pre-med.” I never took a college biology course, because I learned through my college math and chemistry courses that I truly had no interest in medicine. I became a philosophy major, and went to law school. I enjoy being a lawyer.</p>
<p>My wife entered State U as “pre-law,” majored in Political Science, and went to Harvard Law School. She has not practiced law in more than 20 years, thinks the law is “horrid,” and let her bar license lapse.</p>
<p>My father enrolled in an engineering school, majored in mechanical engineering, and spent the first few years of his career trying to work out of engineering. He had a very successful career in management at IBM.</p>
<p>My brother entered State U as a “construction management” major. After a couple of years, he decided he wanted to become a doctor, transferred to an east coast elite public university, and went to med school. He is now on the faculty at a renowned medical school.</p>
<p>How does any young person know his or her path? My older son is finding his way as a junior at an elite LAC, and my younger son is doing the same at Columbia. They are both totally on track, in my book.</p>
<p>admissionsgeek, I agree that part of “filling the class” by the admissions folks includes making sure that a diversity of academic interests are represented. I also agree that many young folks perceive that they are fairly certain of their academic interests. Perhaps my family members are unusual in their meandering paths toward career choices, but my anecdotal knowledge of friends’ experiences are not much different from my family’s.</p>
<p>pbr - it is a long cry to go from “I don’t believe that the admissions folks place a great deal of weight on one’s academic interests, other than CC vs. SEAS.” to “I agree that part of “filling the class” by the admissions folks includes making sure that a diversity of academic interests are represented.” </p>
<p>did you change your mind based on what i wrote? do you believe that uni’s do track this data?</p>
<p>granted, a major choice is not the same as a career choice. lastly your personal example is rather common - the major with the highest drop-off rate is biology (usually as in pre-med) as students realize that being a doctor is not quite what they anticipated. it is discussed in the columbia report as to how to reduce this trend. that is to say - columbia notices trends and most likely operates accordingly.</p>
<p>^admissionsgeek, I believe my two statements may very well be consistent with each other. If half of the applications received are from lifelong students of Greek and Latin who intend to major in Classics, obviously the staff will need to limit the number of applications accepted from that half of the pool. I suspect that the academic interests of Columbia applicants, however, are distributed generally in proportion to the resources allocated to those respective interests. Stated differently, the group of applicants that would be admitted by the staff after considering their academic interests is probably not much different from the group that would be admitted without regard to their academic interests. In other words, through decades of refined resource allocation, Columbia has probably created an infrastructure that reflects the academic interest demographics of its applicants. This issue, like many discussed on this forum, is one that we can’t resolve, absent inside information (which you may possess?).</p>
<p>@adgeek and pbr
I’ll throw my personal anecdotal experience into the mix. I wrote my personal statement about my growing interest in medicine and my experiences working is a hospital. I wrote my “Why Columbia?” about meeting a “New Yorker” writer in Dodge during an overnight visit and how this showed Columbia is intimately involved with the intellectual life of New York. I listed my intended major as English. The student profile I wanted to present: intellectual, loves and appreciates Columbia and the city, interested in medicine.</p>
<p>I think it’s clear that my primary academic interests are the humanities, not the sciences, even though I <em>might</em> go pre-med. What do you think? Will I disappoint the adom if I don’t take a lot of science classes?</p>
<p>The adcoms really have no interaction with the current student population (other than the kids who work in the office, e.g., tour guides). They get to know the class of 20xx very well on paper, and the kids enroll and they move onto the next class and don’t get to follow you through your college years.</p>
<p>pwoods, I suspect the ratio of those expressing a pre-med interest during the application process to those who actually apply to med school four years later is immense, as alluded to by admissionsgeek. Columbia2002 makes perfect sense when he/she states that admissions folks move on after the class is admitted, but in the extremely unlikely event he/she is incorrect, you will likely join the disappointment train with my son only if you never take an English course at Columbia.</p>
<p>well here is the cavaet - though admission folks may not follow you and in general columbia doesn’t care what you do so long as you graduate, the choices you make help them figure out how perhaps to improve their recruitment, selection, retention and major advising strategies. you become a statistic worth studying. (just like i am currently a statistic worth studying in my high school’s naviance program.)</p>
<p>most top universities care about what happens to students from birth to death in the university, and so they try to create a comprehensive system to make sure that they can both support students in coming to their own decisions and maintain their priorities. for example - would a student have chosen to go in to science if s/he received more science-specific support early on? it wont change anything materially for you, but might alter things in the future.</p>
<p>Mostly because of $$. The alumni giving people at top schools have very sophisticated stats on donating behavior, like what types of people donate $ and when.</p>