<p>I read here that you shouldn't go if you are</p>
<p>Any student who defines themselves as one of the following will not fit in at Columbia: a creative learner, a do-it-yourself type, someone who hates structure, someone who works outside the box, people who don't like big cities, socialists, activists.</p>
<p>is this true?</p>
<p>If you want a traditional college experience, don’t go to Columbia.</p>
<p>If you want a big-city college experience (i.e. forgoing a lot of the traditional college campus experience), consider Columbia.</p>
<p>truazn: when you present choices as binaries it makes it hard for anyone to say which side of the divide they are on. as far as big city colleges, columbia has a lot of traditional elements, as far as traditional colleges, columbia has a lot of big-city elements.</p>
<p>ultimately, in my mind, this is a strength of columbia, but does make it hard to properly contextualize.</p>
<p>I dunno. If traditional college experience means parties with 400 people in a barn, I think everyone’s agreed (and stated like fifty times) that things like that don’t happen here, with anywhere near the regularity one would expect if one’s point of reference for college were Animal House.</p>
<p>However, the vast majority of the “types of people who shouldn’t go to Columbia” listed below are almost certainly the result of an incredible misunderstanding of the core:</p>
<p>“a creative learner, a do-it-yourself type, someone who hates structure, someone who works outside the box”</p>
<p>All of these types of people fit in great at columbia. Someone probably looked at the fact that we had a core, assumed that meant everything at columbia was hyper-traditional (apparently forgot that 1968, or the hunger strike like three years ago, ever happened), and then concluded that people who don’t fit into a framework determined for them by the university wouldn’t enjoy columbia. </p>
<p>Nothing could be further from the truth. Why? </p>
<p>1) The core, like everything else at Columbia, is what you make it. If you get here and find that you hate the core, you will also quickly find that while it does end up being around 1/4 of your credits (adcoms say 1/3, but that’s based on 124 credits—almost all columbia students end up taking more than 124 credits before graduation), it can be far less than 1/4 of your total time spent on schoolwork. You can also be super passionate and intense about the core and read every book twice and be a core superstar.</p>
<p>2) The administration does very little hand-holding, taking a very hands-off approach to student life. While this does have its disadvantages (such as the fact that building bleachers for graduation resulted in Bacchanal getting moved to a different and inferior location, which is truly unacceptable on the part of the administration), it also has great advantages for do-it-yourself types. In fact, those are the people who most belong at Columbia, in my opinion. They won’t sit around waiting for their adviser to tell them what they need to do to finish the degree (hint: he or she won’t), they’ll get on the website and figure it out for themselves. They won’t just be annoyed by the lack of a sustainable development major or a linguistics major, they’ll go out and design their own (these are two majors that enough students did as independent majors that they became/are becoming official majors in their own right). </p>
<p>3) Anyone who doesn’t think that socialists can fit in at Columbia should come visit my CC class. And like every class at Columbia.</p>
<p>4) Anyone who doesn’t think activists can fit in at Columbia should try walking through campus on a sunny day and counting all the flyers they receive and all the bake sales they walk past.</p>
<p>5) If you don’t like big cities, you probably shouldn’t come to Columbia, not because you can’t have a big-city-less experience at Columbia (you totally can: you can live in housing that’s very close to campus every semester, and never leave morningside heights), but because you’ll miss out on some of the best things going to Columbia has to offer (NEW YORK CITY) and so you might as well let your spot at Columbia go to someone who will take better advantage of NYC. Of course if the choice is Columbia or a school with less academic rigor, fewer resources, etc., you should still come to Columbia, but if we’re comparing, say, Columbia and Brown or Amherst or Duke, etc.</p>
<p>But yeah, I’d imagine very independent people would perhaps have a harder time at HYP (particularly Princeton, if my impression of that school is correct) than in New York and at Columbia.</p>
<p>So, basically, if one dislikes the Core and/or big cities, they shouldn’t go to Columbia? Shocker.</p>
<p>Haha, I agree with glassesarechic. This is self explainatory! Anyone looking for the classic, Ivy League university experience with eating halls that reminds you of Hogwarts, then Columbia isn’t exactly the university you are looking for.</p>
<p>“a creative learner, a do-it-yourself type, someone who hates structure, someone who works outside the box”</p>
<p>Columbia is full of these people. It’s those who can’t think for themselves or cannot bear to critique structure that may have issues here.</p>
<p>“people who don’t like big cities”</p>
<p>This is true. Columbia is obviously in the largest and best city in the country, so if you prefer small towns, you will probably not be happy here. Columbia does have a campus, though; it’s not an “urban school” in the sense of just being distributed throughout the city (like NYU). But you will be living in the city, with a cosmopolitan culture, lots of people, and all the rest. Of course, that’s what draws people to Columbia in the first place!</p>
<p>“socialists, activists”</p>
<p>This is just asinine. Columbia is one of the most socially and politically active campuses in the country, and the legacy of the 1968 protests is taken very seriously. You’ll have a much tougher time at Columbia as a close-minded conservative than as a socialist or (liberal) activist. Even conservatives, though, are generally respected.</p>
<p>So if you don’t want a traditional college experience, don’t go to Harvard, right?</p>
<p>Harvard is in cambridge, just right across the river from downtown Boston.</p>
<p>madogmgd - </p>
<p>I would suggest taking any type of generalizations cautiously. Can you imagine a student body of around 20,000 people being that similar in their interests, preferences, social/political standpoints, and the like?</p>
<p>Go visit Columbia’s campus, talk to students and faculty, sit in on a class, feel the vibe, and decide for yourself. Whatever you do, I’d encourage you to avoid making your life decisions based on any type of generalizations; be it a positive or a negative one, be it one that suits you or doesn’t suit you. Being a student, especially at a top notch institution such as Columbia (or any similar institution) requires one not merely to have an open mind, but to be able to make ones decisions.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>