<p>I’m not saying the administration shouldn’t continue to strive to improve, but there are certainly learning opportunities from navigating it.</p>
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<p>yup, and in retrospect making friends with administrators and learning how to get things done with the columbia administration was also a positive experience.</p>
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<p>this isn’t untrue at Columbia, it’s just more work.</p>
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<p>again there’s good access to advisers/professors and grants but none of them will come to you without you taking the initiative. If there wasn’t good access to these when you were here (which was nearly 10 years ago now yes?), things have improved.</p>
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<p>this is a fair perspective, but others learn to seek out opportunities and succeed regardless of whether the administration is pushing those opportunities or not.</p>
<p>nope this is a straw man. I said there are learning opportunities from navigating a bureaucracy, which are also present at a state school (perhaps even more so). I never said Columbia’s bureaucracy is better for student’s than Dartmouth’s, hence:</p>
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<p>I’m pointing to an advantage of having to work a bureaucracy in college, which students might overlook. Overall Dartmouth’s administration is preferable to Columbia’s, and this does not preclude advantages from having to navigate a worse bureaucracy. My friends at UCB and UVA said the bureaucracy was so difficult to navigate that it often came in the way of their success like not being able to organize an event. This isn’t true at Columbia, the administration has students’ best interests at heart, it’s just a complex and decentralized organizational structure. I wasn’t prevented from running a club event successfully, close access to advisers, professors etc. Student government threw huge events, like entire undergrad dinners on our quad, and regular events like weekly senior class pub nights in the student center, they had to work very hard to do this, but it was never prevented from happening. Some of my best friends were high up in student government and none of them complained about not being able to accomplish whatever they set out to do because of the administration.</p>
<p>again, it isn’t insulting anyone’s intelligence to say that they likely don’t have a skill which they are not expected to have. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you will not be able to successfully trade derivatives without serious training, is that insulting your intelligence? If you are a successful derivatives trader then hopefully you’re smart enough to see my point. I’m not making a blanket statement about all high school students, I’m sure some are experts at navigating a bureaucracy, but it’s something I and several of my friends at Columbia learned in college. Perhaps we lagged average intelligence and skills then.</p>
<p>objobs, we’re not claiming that bureaucracy is a good thing and it’s something that prospectives should look for in their college search because it teaches you “life lessons” and whatnot. If we were, then I would agree with you that we’re insulting the intelligence of prospies. </p>
<p>I guess strictly speaking you never said it, but you were clearly presupposing some sort of optimal (Columbia-level) difficulty whereby the “life lessons” of navigating school bureaucracy are balanced by the chances of successfully navigating that bureaucracy (or not). But someone at Dartmouth could easily say that the the “life lessons” are trivial and that the success of the navigation is all that matters. Or someone at UC-B or UVa could easily say the opposite.</p>
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<p>It’d be helpful if you actually read what I wrote (which you quoted in post #37, by the way): </p>
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<p>What’s insulting is your awful spin re: bureaucracy. Do you expect prospective Ivy Leaguers to buy your argument that their parents should (potentially) shell out 200 grand so that they may receive “life lessons” from dealing with bureaucracy? Aren’t their parents paying a premium so that they don’t have to deal with bureaucracy in the first place?</p>
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<p>No, probably not because presumably trading derivatives is a lot more complicated that navigating bureaucracy, unless Columbia’s bureaucracy is ridiculously more unmanageable than you make it out to be. Any “serious training” for navigating bureaucracies can be had for free at the local DMV. Why pay up to $50K/yr for it?</p>
<p>Rightly or wrongly, this could be said about virtually any university. There’s no evidence that this is more true of Columbia than its peer instititutions. If history is any indication, this probably hasn’t been very true at all.</p>
<p>Who is this kid and why does s/he try to argue with concoll? Certainly the worst ■■■■■ I’ve seen on this board in the past year and definitely up there on my top3 list…</p>
<p>^Might as well get used to it. With 113 posts in less than a month, objobs seems to be a presence. Perhaps he or she is just seeking to refine his or her high school debate skills.</p>
<p>^That’s one point of view. Another is that he or she is trying to argue the merits of a piece of art or literature with symbolic logic. confidentialcoll, admissionsgeek, et al., keep up the good fight!</p>
<p>I actually completely agree with objobs in this case, and I don’t get why people label him a ■■■■■ for what he’s saying.</p>
<p>I’ve said this before but I’m a Legacy who also has a current relative attending and was admitted this year. I asked my dad about his experiences with Columbia, and he told me a drawback from Columbia was the notoriously terrible administration. Going into the admitted student days, they showed me nothing to dispute this. There weren’t enough “tickets” for everyone to see a core class (only school I visited with this problem, and sort of defeats the purpose of the visit in the first place), the events were really sparse, and the only redeeming factor was cool hosts. I was actually very disappointed with how clearly my other options (Princeton and Yale) were on another level from Columbia. Although maybe that’s not a fair comparison because of endowment differences.</p>
<p>If your response to that is “Things are a lot different than when your dad went, and you can’t make judgments based on Admitted Student Days” then I think that’s totally reasonable. If you say the administration is actually decent at Columbia and I just am uninformed because I’ve never actually attended school there, I believe you. </p>
<p>But if the response is “Well, the administration is still bad. But it makes you a better person!” I’m going to call you out on a steaming pile of BS. Columbia’s poor administration gives student experience in navigating bureaucracy? Give me a break. That’s an excuse for not improving a clearly broken system. The stresses and difficulties of a terrible administration are far more costly to the good of students than any “experience navigating bureaucracy” would be.</p>
<p>You would think of all the non HYPS(M) schools, Columbia would have the best chance at cracking into the elite group. No school should be able to offer as much in terms of internships and work opportunities as Columbia, and the school should be able to attract the best international students because of its reputation.</p>
<p>But mismanagement has held them back from being there, at least in the past (there’s a reason Obama–by a mile Columbia’s most famous alumni–refuses to acknowledge his undergraduate alma mater), and mismanagement should not be given an excuse if it still occurs.</p>
<p>^If you gathered from objobs’s posts some sort of issue with the Columbia bureaucracy, fine. I gathered something else, but I agree with the concerns expressed in your post. With all due respect to those who think a business is not run well but that the silver lining is that those dealing with that business learn how to “toughen up,” I suggest that one should not need to toughen up to deal with that business. I appreciate the silver lining, but colleges are, after all, in the business of administering education.</p>
<p>Having said that, I also believe that administrative experiences are, at the end of the day, anecdotal, even unique. My alleged son at Columbia has had no issue with the administration (although he got into a bit of hot water when he emailed a professor to announce in advance that he would miss a class for a reason that was not deemed acceptable). My own alleged limited experiences of the campus visit, moving him into his dorm, and enjoying convocation, limited orientation week activities, and parents weekend, were flawless. My son and I both believe Columbia was a perfect choice.</p>
<p>Because s/he seems to be arguing for no reason other than to argue. This can be ok but top this off with the fact that s/he has apparently NO experience at or with Columbia…well, that just equals ■■■■■ to me.</p>
<p>parents pay money for a variety of reasons, one of which is to go to college to learn how to deal with real life. Would you like to dictate what parents should and should not pay for?</p>
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<p>a) it’s ridiculous to say that 50k/yr is spent on one aspect of hundreds that form a columbia experience. Do kids at stanford pay 50k a year to play frisbee on a lawn? no that’s one of hundreds of things they pay for. </p>
<p>b) all you learn at a DMV is how to wait your turn. If you think a trip to the DMV teaches you how to navigate a bureaucracy, then perhaps you haven’t learned it yet.</p>
<p>I’m not saying what parents should or should not do. I just don’t think they’re paying 200 grand (or whatever) for their kids to deal with bureaucracy; they’re paying so that their kids DON’T have to deal with bureaucracy. These are descriptive, not prescriptive claims.</p>
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<p>I dunno. I’ll ask my classmates when I start in the fall. As for me, my EFC is zero because my family is low income. But if someone were to pay 50K a year, he or she would probably rather pay to play frisbee than navigate bureaucracies. Sounds a lot more fun.</p>
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<p>My parents are working class immigrants who barely speak English. I’ve learned more about dealing with bureacracies than you’ll ever know. The fact that you think you get “life lessons” from dealing with an IVY LEAGUE administration just shows how sheltered your life is.</p>
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<p>I really can’t comment on what you “sense” (or not). Only you can do that.</p>
<p>Please don’t assume that you’re the only person on this board who comes from a tough background. The fact that you do just shows how sheltered your life is.</p>
<p>I only assumed that someone who thinks that you get “life lessons” from dealing with Ivy League administrators couldn’t have come from that tough a background. Please don’t put words in my mouth.</p>