Princeton vs. Columbia: Engineering

Colleges and Universities A-Z Columbia University
41

<p>It would be a sad day when Columbia merges SEAS with the College.</p>

<h1>1 It would be retrograde. Just when other Ivies are trying to create a distinct identity for their engineering divisions. Call Harvard, Yale and Brown. Yale even offered invitations this year to RD applicants in February before formal acceptances on April 1 and invited them to a campus gathering (much like for athletes).</h1>

<h1>2 Most students who apply to Yale or Harvard indicating interest in engg do not major in it. Yale had all of 70 undergraduate students who majored in engineering counting all years as of 2010. Hardly ten percent of freshmen follow through. There are many reasons :the long trek to Science Hill, dreary afternoon hours of labs and the sheer difficulty of doing hard math, physics and computer science.</h1>

<h1>3 The SEAS acceptance rate this year was less then 10%. This is better than MIT and far superior to UPenn SEAS and Caltech. I state this to shut up the inevitable ranter who will spout some spurious numbers.</h1>

<h1>4 Because Admissions is common to both SEAS and the College, SEAS can focus on the intrinsic engineering aptitude of the applicant. This is another way of saying that it does not have to admit to make up specific percentages for pc purposes unlike MIT which has to create a class of males, females, athletes, legacies, URMs and internationals regardless of whether these applicants really have the aptitude. Go the MIT website. You will find that the male female ratio is almost 1:1 but they get nearly three times as many male applicants as females. Also the females they want are cross-admits everywhere and thus they have to stretch really deep into the pool to make up the 1:1 class. SEAS does not have to do that. Thus its average ability level is probably much higher than MIT. While MIT may attract the top math high schoolers, their class is simply not that good when you get down below the top ten percent. This is information derived from their numbers. Columbia SEAS is getting much better students and its reputation is improving with every class. There is hardly a trading desk in NY that does not have Columbia SEAS FE grads.</h1>

<p>Please folks, SEAS is one of Columbia’s hidden gems.</p>

42

<p>in terms of raw academic accomplishment, scores and drive, Columbia seas is right up there. the harder grading is annoying and a serious disadvantage at times, but seas kids who work on wall street (I am one) do really well, because they were qualified to begin with and then have to bust their @$$ over the years. I’ve witnessed kids even with average grades get interviews at top consulting firms and banking divisions and seas is especially liked by trading desks and quantitative groups. the training you get as an engineering student at seas prepares you very well for any job in finance/consulting. businesses care about numbers, they want to see analytical and numerical work from analysts, even at McKinsey or BCG, anyone can put together flowery qualitative arguments and they don’t weigh a whole lot in a pitchbook, research strategy or a presentation of recommendations to a client.</p>

43

<p>As a student who just attended the Princeton Preview weekend and choosing between Pton and Columbia SEAS, I want to throw in my two cents. I first want to say that I believe where you go as an undergraduate does not matter. I’m convinced an engineering degree from either school will get me where I need to go. Therefore, I place the personal experience as the major factor when deciding colleges. I’m choosing Columbia. I had the opportunity to speak with many current students regarding their decision to attend Pton. I would always ask if they considered CU as a viable option. Almost always, they would ask if I enjoyed new york city, which is practically the only reason I am considering Columbia. The vast majority (read: all but one Pton engineer) told me Columbia would be an acceptable fit and the difference attention to undergraduates is not a deal-breaker. Admittedly, I came into the weekend very much anticipating I would attend Columbia, but wanted to see first-hand if I would be making sacrifices by not attending pton. Rest assured, my host, who I know personally, gave his all in trying to convince me otherwise. However, the “orange bubble” was all-too-real for me.</p>

44

<p>Well, I transferred from seas to college, actually not too hard. I have 3.5 GPA and two ok letters from Profs. But my reason is cogent. Ironically, I decided to not to accept the transfer offer after I took some great classes that really boost my interest in engineering. Don’t worry, as long as you got into columbia, you can transfer to wherever you want, your CSA advisor will help you (except those crazy Chinese or British schools that never admit transfers )</p>

45

<p>Don’t know if transfer is that easy. I know someone who took 2 years to do it and he really tried to be involved on campus and get great teacher recommendations.</p>

<p>I talked to my CSA advisor who was on the admissions committee for a while. She recommended applying to other schools as well if I really didn’t want to study engineering, because there was a good chance that I wouldn’t get in. </p>

<p>I guess the key is that your reason needs to be persuasive. It can’t be, “Engineering is difficult and I’m not interested in it anymore. I’m doing pre-med so my GPA is being destroyed.” It needs to be, “Since taking Lit Hum, I’ve realized that I want to study classics in the college.”</p>

46

<p>damm…this truazn kid is pretty ****ed up.</p>

<p>must be a painful existence to spend day after day being negative and cursing your life to the most extreme extent. </p>

<p>just maybe truazn…you dint have a good time at columbia because of YOU. just maybe your (most likely imaginary) friend at columbia got into a ‘second tier’ consulting firm cuz HE ****ed up in college. just maybe…you can apply to princeton for grad school/move to princeton new jersey/work at princeton as a professor and stop being such a depressing and ridiculous idiot.</p>

<p>no one…i repeat NO ONE is gonna share wtvr ****ed up things you went through in college. so instead of being the most negative and bashful poster on cc ive seen…get a life and allow people who are genuinely excited and enthusiastic about columbia to enjoy it for themselves. </p>

<p>its beautiful outside on campus today. if its even possible for you…enjoy it.</p>

47

<p>^ Says the freshman. Just wait buddy =) Let me know how your recruiting goes if you think “second-tier” consulting is “f****** up” at Columbia.</p>

48

<p>Isn’t it rather difficult to transfer from SEAS to CC? the OP says she isn’t entirely sure if she wants to do engineering. In this case, Princeton would be better…no?</p>

49

<p>power: the OP says she isn’t sure she wants to spend the rest of her career in engineering, not that she doesn’t want to do engineering.</p>

<p>it isn’t super difficult to transfer between the schools, especially if the student is good about negotiating the politics of the situation. realizing that transferring because one dislikes engineering is insufficient, and having a good academic reason for transferring (desire to go into a completely different field where a specific expertise is needed) is necessary. about a dozen students change schools each year.</p>

50

<p>geek: I never said she didn’t want to do engineering. I said that she said she isn’t entirely sure. </p>

<p>

</p>

<p>also, 12 transfers/year doesn’t seem like a lot to me…</p>

51

<p>there are only ~300 kids in the engineering school each year, and not everyone is looking to transfer. it isn’t as big an eng school as penn seas. and there certainly are unhappy students, and unhappy students that try to transfer and are denied, but the VAST majority of students do not try to transfer.</p>

<p>it is for that reason that folks that decide to attend seas should be well aware that seas is an engineering school and it is difficult. yet it also, as folks on here and other threads have said, is not impossible to transfer if you do enter with that frame of mind and are proactive in your efforts to maintain a good gpa and also to do the politics to curry favor.</p>

<p>but you’re right 12 students is not a lot. which tells you just how much hullabaloo is made up in one sense, but also the fact that as a deterrent it does a pretty good job of deflecting students that might be even more prone to transfer.</p>

<p>in this: quantman’s post is especially prescient about the benefits of such.</p>

52

<p>I dont understand why so many people are worrying so much whether it is hard to transfer from cc or seas to seas or cc or to barnard to gs or to nyu (if you like hipsters)…
It is all about your reason of transferring! As long as you are at Columbia and have good grades, you are qualified, you just need to show the right reason. Tell the truth! My reason is genuine, I never mention how much I like the core (I hate it) and how hard engineering is (it is damn hard)…I just told them as an international student from a middle class family who did not get any f**king financial aid, I just want to be happy at columbia, I dont want to transfer to anywhere else again. That’s it</p>

53

<p>Bottom Line: Transferring is not easy. Transferring between SEAS and CC is like transferring from Columbia to another peer institution. </p>

<p>1) Cast your net wide.
2) Make a good reason as to why you want to transfer. List positives of prospective school, not negatives of your current situation</p>

<p>Can we just agree that transferring between SEAS and CC is like transferring from Columbia to Penn, perhaps not as competitive as getting into Yale but not easy without the right reasons, grades, essays, and recommendations? </p>

<p>Enough talk about it being an effective deterrent, how there’s no interest in transferring in SEAS, or how not that many people do it each year. There are people who want to transfer. From that group, there are people who actually go through the process of transferring. Then, there are those who actually get in. There’s also a significant number of people who want to become engineers and continue with the process. However, I find it difficult to believe that people actually enjoy studying engineering as an academic discipline. It’s for the jobs.</p>

54

<p>I couldn’t care less about Columbia’s transfer policies or politics. I was just making the point that if the OP is not entirely sure that she wants to go into engineering, then perhaps she should go to Princeton as opposed to Columbia where she will have less of a problem switching majors.</p>

<p>Yes, she may be able to transfer from SEAS to CC if she has a good reason (though I personally don’t think the OP’s reason would qualify as one), recommendations, grades, etc…but why go through all that when she can go to Princeton and not have to deal with the transfer process? Assuming she’s OK with both environments, that is.</p>

55

<p>beard: we can’t agree because it isn’t true. there is a separate process for transferring between cc and seas, as transferring from penn to columbia. in some ways the process is probably easier, and in others harder (things columbia internally does know about its own students and their reasons). but being naive and spouting things that you think are true when they are not true isn’t helpful.</p>

<p>i will concede the following:
a) engineering is really hard. it is a tough life, and not everyone is made for it nor wants it.
b) for the person that is unsure about engineering, there is something troublesome about feeling compelled to study this discipline. there is an argument that in many ways i support that students ought to have the ability to decide their own fate.</p>

<p>let me know if you will agree to these points
a) engineering is a varied and strong skill set that is especially important in today’s increasingly technical, technological, computational and applied world. it therefore provides access to job in the short run, and access to opportunties in the long run that are beneficial to students irrespective of their school of employment.
b) universities and countries have an interest in supporting engineering and tech ventures. therefore they have an interest in producing individuals that will enter that sector - both as a public good, but also for private benefit.
c) there is a necessary balance, even in college, between freedom to choose and structure. and schools will for differing reasons and with differing purposes take a place along that line. even schools like brown necessarily provide structure. other schools provide structural boundaries between schools with discrete purposes.</p>

<p>on this last point: as a good friend of mine that was an engineer put it when columbia was having the debate over introducing more self-directed learning (where students are professors) - he scoffed. at times that structure comes in the form of classes that in their enclosed nature are already structural, at times they come in the form of curricula, like the core, that hope to guide students through learning with foundational aspects. but pedagogy even goes further into producing schools, closed off experiences that hope to induce from the student a necessary discipline to achieve proficiency in what is a technically demanding guild. columbia doesn’t set the requirements to be an engineer, remember.</p>

56

<p>and power: like all things in life. knowing how to play the game makes the game easy to play. if the OP knows that she must develop a compelling reason to apply, she will go about developing a compelling reason through a concerted effort (working with professors, her advisors, etc). </p>

<p>the funny thing being here…in having to develop a reason to apply, guess what? she will be better prepared to make the transition. it doesn’t become a path of least resistance, but rather a conscious and deliberate choice.</p>

57

<p>I could have sworn there was a post by this guy claiming to be a current senior at SEAS who took a religion class first semester and tried to transfer to CC to be a religion/history major. He was rejected and went into depression as a result, tanking his GPA to 2.5 or something.</p>

<p>Anyone else remember this or am I hallucinating? I think it was posted after beard tax’s last post but it’s now gone. How odd.</p>

58

<p>shrugging, are you having hallucinatory dreams about college confidential? it is time to get off.</p>

<p>the person could have been lying and the moderator removed the post. but let us all remember that anecdotes don’t make policy.</p>

59

<p>No need to get so testy admissionsgeek.</p>

<p>1) It’s tough to transfer. I don’t know if admissionsgeek actually conceded in his last post, but I will say that he has more experience on these matters. However, I sometimes doubt the sincerity of his posts and whether there’s an agenda to sell Columbia by bending the truths. When it’s something as opaque as admissions, what can we rely on except objective indicators such as the number of people who actually make it? Can we reject a couple other dozen people by saying that their reasons for pursuing their interests aren’t valid, especially when it’s so much easier at peer institutions? How can people on this board even believe that my CSA advisor told me about the process and she worked on the committee?</p>

<p>2) The teaching at Princeton is better than the teaching at Columbia, both from a rankings perspective (Princeton Review and UNSWR) and from anecdotal evidence. Look at undergraduate teaching quality and other reviews from these websites. Please don’t criticize these reviews and other anecdotal evidence, because if you discount these points as being flawed, then what else is there to compare anything?</p>

<p>A great many of the professors at Columbia in the engineering department are bad, plain and simple. The good departments are Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and perhaps Civil Engineering. I’ve heard overwhelmingly bad reviews from ChemE, BME, and the IEOR departments (I’m IEOR). My friend who’s taking Introduction to Financial Engineering visited a friend at Princeton and sat in on a comparable class. You know what? They actually didn’t need their textbook because the professor actually taught the course. This same class at Columbia is taught by someone who doesn’t speak English. Columbia Engineering school is like online school without the benefit of lectures being posted. Prepare to teach 50% of the classes to yourself in your 3rd and 4th years.</p>

<p>3) Social life can be very fragmented. It’s a city campus so don’t expect too much space. It can be hard to congregate in a location and hang out together due to these space constraints. Morningside Heights is still populated by many residents and grad students so undergraduates definitely get lost in the shuffle. There are 6000 undergrads, 14000 graduate students, and countless local residents.</p>

<p>The university really provides no support structure for students so it’s either sink or swim. There are several highly attended events each year which include Bacchanal, Glass House Rocks, and Backyard BBQ. Regardless, it’s a city college so expect it to be similar to NYU where you have to make your own fun and there isn’t much green space to play football or frisbee.</p>

<p>Overall, I think Columbia is a unique experience and quite polarizing at that. Make it what you will, there are plenty of happy and unhappy alumni. Plenty of people graduate Columbia saying “I will miss it when I leave.” From what I heard, the engineering alumni for the most part say “It will take me a couple years to miss this.” On the bright side, I heard that there was a ChemE major who actually got into Yale Medical School and is absolutely killing it. He says it’s way easier than ChemE so I guess that he paid now to enjoy later.</p>

60

<p>@ShruggingSheep, you wouldn’t believe the incidence of mental issues that arise from engineering at Columbia. Common refrain at Center for Student Advising as well as Columbia Psychological Services. Once again, anecdotal evidence so what is it worth anyways?</p>