<p>I was wondering...is it slightly less competitive to get into Columbia if you choose a non-popular major? In other words, are you putting more barriers against you by choosing a popular major?</p>
<p>Second question, is chem popular at Columbia?</p>
<p>I would believe that it would have such a little effect on one’s application. Since you don’t declare your major in your freshman year, it simply means that this is what you are considering. However, if you do put a major that’s not popular, I do believe Coumbia will take it into account, just to imagine you, as a fit into the columbia body.</p>
<p>Oh! I didn’t know that…I thought what you put on your commonapp is final…either way, I’m certain I want Chem 
(It is also my major in High School).</p>
<p>What’s your desired major?</p>
<p>Computer Science, with a minor in Philosophy.</p>
<p>Excuse my ignorance, but what is a minor? (I could guess from its name, but I want to make sure)</p>
<p>@Silence… simply put, " College Minor - A minor is a secondary field that you want to specialize in while you are working on your major. Generally, your major is what your intended career is, but your minor is something you pursue because of your personal interests." </p>
<p>I’ve seen you posting quite a bit lately on the CC forums, I wish you the best of luck man, hopefully we will see each other next year at Butler Library or something :)</p>
<p>@doctorje24: Thanks for the info!</p>
<p>And yeah, I’m very excited to find out the result these last few days. I too wish you the best of luck and hopefully we’ll meet in Columbia next year :)</p>
<p>i have stated this elsewhere - </p>
<p>a) your major doesn’t matter to folks within the advising system, therefore no one will hold you to your major choice, you can do what you will.
b) your major does matter A LOT for admissions because admissions officers will care about
<p>they have selection models that help them predict how many students tend to stay with their chosen major so that they admit enough physicists such that the physics department is not too small. universities don’t care if you chose to be an artist, but they care that they admit enough artists such that after you factor in all the folks that sell out to economics you still have some artists in school.</p>
<p>the problem then with underrepresented majors is that they tend to be areas of specialty that most 16 yos usually do not grow up and say “i want to go do that in college,” or more often than not in columbia’s case “i want to go to a liberal arts college and not a conservatory.”</p>
<p>thus the usual underrepresented majors at ivies are the arts (visual arts, dance, theater, music) european languages that are passe (german, italian, classics), some other humanities (philosophy and art history mostly) and especially quant heavy sciences (physics mostly). they are underrepresented because students tend to be low in numbers, particularly relative to the size of the faculty</p>
<p>problem? if you have no experience in any, and i mean REAL experience, you won’t be admitted as a student with that major in mind. so unless you have a really strong profile in those majors you wont be admitted, does this mean that you could be a bit weaker than the average student admitted who checks econ? perhaps. but it also means if you say you want to do dance you should be at the level of someone who could dance at a major ballet company, and not someone who was the lead in your high school’s musical. skill must still be at a high level.</p>
<p>You said physics…but is chemistry underrepresented?</p>
<p>And what you said brought joy to me because my app should be shouting chem…took AP chem exam, chem sat ii, took chem in sophomore, junior and senior year, volunteered at pharmacy…and I want to become a a pharmacist or doctor later on. :)</p>
<p>Based on the data I have on majors (adgeek knows what I’m referring to), chemistry is very underrepresented (even more so than physics) in Columbia College. Only around 0.25% of the class majors in chem each year. Chemical engineering is a very popular major in SEAS, though.</p>
<p>@pwoods: Best news I heard all day!!! 
:D</p>
<p>lol speaking of which then…is american history (i chose american studies, poli sci, and history as my 3 areas) competitive? like its legit i really love american history but like its not gonna work against me as more popular majors might?</p>
<p>pwoods, any information on how represented political science and biochemistry are?</p>
<p>^^^Sorry, I just wanted to comment >.<</p>
<p>From what I read, political science is perhaps the most (over?)represented at Columbia…and isn’t biochem…just taking both bio and chem as majors (excuse my ignorance if this is wrong).</p>
<p>I’m not sure. Biochemistry was listed as one of the choices of major I think on Columbia’s supplement.</p>
<p>pwoods - </p>
<p>it is not however the case with students who apply with chem as a major - that is super overrepresented in the applicant pool even though it is not as represented in the school. many students will do chem, biochem or bio as major choices because they have premed in mind. so unless you as a chem prospect have an actual interest in chem research, you probably will be hard to distinguish from the horde that wants to be premed. columbia does do some extra science analysis because of the science scholar programs they have - so it does find some of those real chem kids - but most are just premed folks in sheep’s clothing.</p>
<p>so though i would agree chem actually is underrep, it is not an advantage unto itself to apply with chem as a major choice. it is only an advantage if you have an actual interest in doing chem research (phd down the line) and it comes out in your application. something that like with physics is hard to do. just taking ap chem is insufficient. also doing lab med research probably isn’t good enough to say you want to be a chem kid. the folks that are true chem phd types know who they are - and there aren’t many of them. </p>
<p>political science is overrepresented in the pool, and like econ is a major that folks flock to after admission. so my guess is that fewer polisci students than the 150 or so per class are admitted, they probably hope to yield 100 folks with full knowledge that it would grow to 150+ as a result of attrition from other majors.</p>
<p>bio is a major that is overrepresented in the pool, but it is a major that holds very few students, there is a whole provost presentation in columbia’s unclassified stuff that talks about the problem of retaining students who actually want to do bio research and not med school wannabes. so again it is not to a student’s advantage necessarily just because they check bio - the burden is higher to show that they are not just interested in premed, and if premed is their interest that there is a great degree of depth to their application (academic and otherwise).</p>
<p>biochem is a jointly administered major between bio and chem, you take courses in both and then will probably work with someone in the chem dept that does organic or biochem kind of research. most of the majors that are chem+ are usually housed within the chem dept primarily.</p>
<p>so Columbia does take into consideration your major choices? I unfortunately put down the popular choices but I do have extracurriculars to back them up, such as completing a research project related to biochemistry. How screwed am I?</p>
<p>you are as screwed as everyone else trying to get into one of the 10 most difficult schools to be admitted to in the country. but consider this: what else would you have put down? if you want to do biochem, why lie, what do you gain? if you put down religion, but it doesn’t appear as you have any interest in religion, then it just seems silly, and you stand even less of a chance of impressing.</p>
<p>the hard part is for you to really ‘game’ the system you need to start at the beginning of high school spending countless hours perfecting some obscure skill. it really makes it hard to game the system. because the thought would be by then you might really love german and applying with german in mind isn’t such a crazy thing.</p>
<p>but yes, majors matter. they are not the end all be all, but it is part of the analysis. i mean this is very intuitive, universities need to have diversity of majors to have a reason to have different departments and how to distribute funding to different departments.</p>
<hr>
<p>one comment on what i’ve learned from admissions. the first is that there is the actual process of being admitted, and then there is the science of admitting. the former happens without a lot of concern to how many other folks are being admitted, you are admitted because your profile is impressive. second most universities do something called sculpting where they try to make sure that everyone they want to admit is there, and that the varieties exist, perhaps they overadmitted during the original round and need to cut, or perhaps they underadmitted and want to add. the second will certainly do some of the macro analysis i’ve talked about here. but almost in all cases your admission is not a result of some macro perspective and never is there a quota used - almost always there is a sense that there are numbers that the school is comfortable with and those numbers probably have huge ranges. you are admitted because how you present yourself in the first part of the process.</p>
<p>a columbia adcom said in an info session to someone who asked this question - that each year the office goes through the process, they admit students they want and that almost always after the first process without trying they always get to the point where there is 52% female and 48% male. always. and she said it was not necessarily on purpose, but a realization that the process itself works, and diversity almost always comes about because the admissions folks are trained to know what to look for and find excellence and diversity at the same time. sure there are some things that the adcom wants to happen, but the process itself is such that if a student who wants to do biochem really is impressive then dammit that student is going to be admitted.</p>
<p>Well that sucks…indeed I am planning to get a PhD in chem, but how could I possibly prove such an intention?</p>