<p>How true is this mentality at Columbia?</p>
<p>do a search, this is talked about many times</p>
<p>Not true at all. If anything, it’s a playful rivalry. SEAS students make fun of CC students as being too dumb to do math, and CC students make fun of SEAS students as being nerds who study all the time, etc. </p>
<p>GS students are truly treated as second-class citizens. And BC is a totally different ball of wax which generates its own controversies.</p>
<p>when most cc first years get to college, all they’ve heard about is the acceptance rate and how special they had to be to get in. It’s fashionable and narrow, most other class stats make seas seem significantly harder to get into. CC kids come in thinking it’s been tougher for them, is tougher for them and will be that way, then they either talk to a seas kids or show up in class or attempt a problem set. it really is a nasty delusion.</p>
<p>due respect is given to the seas kids, no second class anything - c2002 sums it up well, do a simple search, there are too many threads on this.</p>
<p>yep, playful relationship. the two schools are treated exactly the same by the entire school administration. you live, eat, work, and in many cases, attend class with people in both schools. the only real difference is the alumni network and events.</p>
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<p>In what way? Most of the stuff that I’m invited to seems joint. I guess the black-tie dinners for the big donors are probably separated.</p>
<p>C2k2 pretty much has it right. Except it usually takes about a semester for CC kids to get over their superiority complexes. </p>
<p>Students arrive. CC students think they’re the most specialist people in the world since the Spec and other sources have a bad habit of misrperesenting statistics (Columbia has the lowest admissions rate in the Ivy League! Shenanigans…) They act out their superiority complex over SEAS kids.</p>
<p>After a semster they get over themselves and move on to feeling superior to Barnard, then GS.</p>
<p>I don’t know Confucian. Over the years, I’ve steadfastly held on to my superiority complex over SEAS students. Of course, my complex also extends to those GS cretins. (I am charitably nice to Barnard students, however–I just have a big heart.)</p>
<p>Oh, and citing the Spec as being indicative of the CC student body is not even sound as pseudo-science! The Spec is not meant to be read; it is meant to be shaped into elegant paper airplanes which are to be launched from Low Steps into the “quad,” spreading alternatively ignorance and destruction, and creating ineradicable dark matter wherever they happen to land.</p>
<p>I have made my peace.</p>
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<p>This must have changed since I was there. CC has always been competitive and had a low acceptance rate, but I don’t think it was as hard to get into 8 years ago. (Albeit, SEAS also was also easier to get into.) And it certainly wasn’t the hardest of the Ivies. So I don’t remember CC students having a superiority complex and thinking they are the specialist kids.</p>
<p>I don’t really care. SEAS gets pampered much more than CC does. Much more than typical engineering schools do.</p>
<p>“I don’t really care. SEAS gets pampered much more than CC does. Much more than typical engineering schools do.”</p>
<p>ok lets see:</p>
<p>physics for poets for CC, i don’t see a poetry for physcists.
frontiers of science for CC, do i hear a frontiers of literature somewhere?
average seas student also takes 5-6 classes vs 4-5 for the average cc student, seas classes are also curved to lower grades.</p>
<p>i don’t see how seas students are pampered, it should be quite the opposite, seas kids take many of the same core classes as the CC kids, seas students can’t do the whole core because that would impede their engineering degrees. Compared to other engineering schools, seas kids cover the same engineering material as peer schools + they do their core requirements, which most peer engineering schools don’t have.</p>
<p>The only way seas students are pampered is being allowed to drop classes upto a month later, that’s because they tend to take more classes and generally difficult ones.</p>
<p>Well, you’ll occasionally see things like “College’s admissions rate at 8.9%, lower than Yale!” Or something like that. Which is absurd, because it excludes SEAS from the calculation, and Yale admits it’s engineers with it’s arts and sciences students into one school. It’s an artificial comparison.</p>
<p>When I was a frosh there were ridiculous claims as to how CC was the “ivy league school” and seas was a back door. Plus the whole no-seas-stats-included-in-us-news didn’t help either. I think Columbia’s done a much better job of marketing them as ‘one school’ since my day.</p>
<p>Seas is a nice place. There are a lot of SEAS only events that the administration puts on that are targeting the school as a whole, which is a fraction of the student body at Columbia. </p>
<p>The existence of joke classes to fulfill a requirement that shouldn’t be an issue for Columbia Caliber students doesn’t really mean they are being pampered, it just means CC can be lazy. Sure CC can pass/fail classes and SEAS can’t but that’s not generally an issue. </p>
<p>From what I hear, frontiers of science is just another waste of time class. A lot of the Core is kinda extra. Do you really need to learn another foreign language? The “core requirements” that most engineering schools won’t have are 2 semesters of lithum/contemporay civ/major cultures and 1 semester of art/music hum. Every other school requires a University Writing type of course, and more and more are requiring a Gateway, engineering design type course. So if you think 3 semesters of extra classes is too much, don’t come here. </p>
<p>In term of classes themselves, seas is a smaller school, and as a result departments are smaller and more intimate. Other than BME and IEOR, everything else is well under 100 students. Compared to other engineering schools, where you are much more of a number, SEAS provides a better atmosphere. A CC student has to respect the ambition of the SEAS students who are pursuing an engineering degree. In no way shape or form are we second class citizens.</p>
<p>^ you left out principles of econ and comp sci that seas students take both of which are substantial, there’s also the pre professional courses and p.e. which aren’t too bad. </p>
<p>“The existence of joke classes to fulfill a requirement that shouldn’t be an issue for Columbia Caliber students doesn’t really mean they are being pampered, it just means CC can be lazy”</p>
<p>if joke classes don’t count as pampering, what does? </p>
<p>also i don’t see any problem or side effect or disadvantage with a few seas only events.</p>
<p>“A CC student has to respect the ambition of the SEAS students who are pursuing an engineering degree. In no way shape or form are we second class citizens.”</p>
<p>i don’t know who you mean by ‘we’ (seas or CC) but CC kids aren’t second class citizens by any means, seas and CC are pretty much on equal footing, just as competitive in and out of class, getting jobs, grad schools etc.</p>
<p>All that really matters in the end is that employers can’t tell the difference between SEAS and CC. Everything else in between is just superfluous rhetoric on behalf of the student body.</p>
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<p>Whaaat? It’s pretty obvious whether someone has an engineering degree or not.</p>
<p>right. but, for the vast majority of employers that Columbia students are interested in, those employers do not care about the difference. that’s the key point. the two are indistinguishable in their value for furthering (non-academic) careers.</p>
<p>thats so so wrong denzera.<br>
a chemE major with the same experience and grades as a chem major has so more employment options.
quant analysis? batch manufacturing processes? almost every employer will go chemE</p>
<p>so two months ago, I said the “vast majority”. If you’re looking to hire an engineer for an engineering job, especially a ChemE job, then yes, they will be less willing to accept substitutes. All else being equal they’ll still give fair consideration to the chemistry major.</p>
<p>Unless you’re looking specifically for (say) an Environmental Engineering position, or a position in academic in your chosen field, all else being equal (including grades, personality, internships or whatever) you’ll find about the same interest level from employers as the equivalent History major. Or better put, the options that the EnvE major will have that the History major will not have, will be roughly equal to the number of options that the History major will have that the EnvE major will not have.</p>
<p>This is not perfectly true, of course, but close enough to answer the original question, which is that CC and SEAS are treated equally by the administration and, largely, by employers.</p>
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<p>I see the point you’re trying to make and agree with the remainder of your post, but I think “the number of options that the History major will have that the EnvE major will not have” is roughly nil.</p>