<p>hi...
i ve applied ED at the Fu Foundation.. but i'm not too sure if i would want to do engineering..
so would it be possible to shift to columbia college at a later stage.. say the middle of the first year?</p>
<p>you really ought to have thought about this before you applied - </p>
<p>columbia clearly states that applying to the engineering school means you have decided that you believe engineering is for you, or that you would like an engineering education in whatever future you desire. </p>
<p>a) you must complete an internal transfer to columbia college; columbia seas and cc try to keep ratios relatively stable thus they do not allow all students to transfer that wish to transfer, it is selective.</p>
<p>b) transferring is difficult for the student - hence above - because you will then have to complete aspects of the core that you had not begun yet, thus hindering your ability to complete a major and the core effectively. it is for this reason that transferring is not an open and shut case for students, and why honestly it is to your advantage if you truly wish to attend columbia to pick the school you like the most, apply, hope you get admitted and attend for 4 years.</p>
<p>if this does not sound enticing - you can always pull out of your ED application, ask to be a RD candidate, you can even at this point in the cycle request to have your application be read as a columbia college candidate, or lastly you may even feel that columbia is not right for you and select to either keep your app open (just to see) or withdraw your application and pick schools that match what you want.</p>
<p>there are a lot of incredible things about columbia - but for practical reasons (a and b) it is not a swinging open door between schools as funding for schools depend on school ratios, and also the quality of the experience for the student depends on students selecting and being comfortable with their school choice from the beginning.</p>
<p>Admissionsgeek is right, you can’t easily transfer internally between SEAS and CC. The application process is highly competitive. If you’re not 100% set on engineering, then Columbia SEAS is not the school to just “try engineering.” Apply to Duke, Princeton, Harvard, etc. engineering schools because it will give you a higher chance of admissions and studying engineering is non-binding; it’s quite easy to switch majors if you find that you dislike the curriculum.</p>
<p>Columbia is one of the only schools that I applied to which forced students to stay in either CC or SEAS; honestly, I find it hard to believe that a 17 or 18 year old will know what they want to study, especially something as difficult as engineering. My advice would be to let the admissions committee know as soon as possible about your decision to apply to the College instead of SEAS.</p>
<p>Just a side note, I also think that’s it would theoretically be easier for CC students to gain admission to SEAS than for SEAS students to gain admission to CC. There is a significant group of students in SEAS who find that engineering is not for them, whereas CC has the flexibility to offer quantitative (mathematics, statistics, computer science) and liberal arts majors. Whereas a CC student can choose between the humanities and the sciences, a SEAS student cannot without transferring to the College.</p>
<p>The admissions committee does take into account the cross-flows between SEAS and CC, and I think it’s generally a one-way street: SEAS students who find that they dislike engineering.</p>
<p>beard - i think you would agree for the following reasons the columbia system exists.</p>
<p>a) historic balkanization of the university discouraged easy flows.
b) the core and restrictions require students to be placed in different camps more fully than schools with vague requirements; a barrier must exist if you want students to finish in 4 years.
c) the disparity between cc to seas in terms of reputation led the former to not want the latter, and the latter to prefer the opportunity to formulate its own identity.</p>
<p>in fact today the biggest obstacle to undergraduate easy flow comes from SEAS and SEAS alumni that fear any kind of taking over by the college will 1) reduce funding to SEAS (ratios would be screwy), 2) destroy the SEAS identity that they have sought to build and the momentum the school has. at this point the college has gotten over the disparity divergence, and most consulting folks have advised that columbia be better branded if it had one ugrad school, however, politically it could be a death sentence to try to extract SEAS ugrads from SEAS without a bloody fight.</p>
<p>further: graduating with a degree in engineering doesn’t behold you to engineering. i think you don’t like the fact that grading is tougher at SEAS, and that is reasonable about your gripes, but in the end you’re graduating from one of the best universities in the world and there is a lot of currency there.</p>
<p>and a final note - columbia’s engineering offerings are far greater than all the schools you’ve mentioned. it can’t quite be compared to those schools - it is more comparable to Penn or Cornell, which do not allow easy flow.</p>
<p>:…it is more comparable to Penn or Cornell, which do not allow easy flow. "</p>
<p>Depends on what you mean by “comparable”. and “easy flow”. It’s true that at Cornell one does have to apply for intercollege transfer, but if you’ve been doing decently overall, and particulary in your arts & sciences courses, it isn’t a huge problem to transfer to Arts from engineering. Or at least it wasn’t when I did this myself, years ago. An adcom comment I heard this summer leads me to suspect it is basically the same now; the most likely circumstance that would cause a problem is if you haven’t been doing well, esp in your CAS courses. But absent performance issues it isn’t considered an “impacted major” situation or anything, this transfer route is not that rare, or that hard. </p>
<p>As for “comparable” I could be mistaken but I thought Cornell’s engineering college was quite a bit larger. I imagine there are many other differences, eg The Core, proportion of students who go on to work in engineering, other things.</p>
<p>admissionsgeek, once again I agree with everything that you have to say. There’s definitely a bit of inertia when it comes to creating a cohesive undergraduate experience. Nonetheless, I’m warning the poster to reconsider engineering even if he or she has a hint of a doubt. It will be an incredibly painful experience to not have any academic freedom. The most that you’ll have is to choose Applied Mathematics, which has the fewest requirements in the SEAS curriculum. The admissions committee does not really care if you are struggling in engineering. The only way to have them consider your application and allow you to transfer to CC is you have a high enough GPA that you can essentially go anywhere you want to (i.e. a 3.8 or above). You’ll be treated essentially like any transfer student, and if you don’t have a 3.5, don’t bother applying.</p>
<p>Furthermore, if you have any pre-professional dreams, you’ll need to work much harder to achieve them, whether it’s pre-law, pre-med, or finance. GPA is tantamount and it’s true that you don’t need to do engineering once you get a degree, but getting a degree with a 3.5 is quite a challenge. Considering that the average GPA in SEAS is a 3.0-3.3, there are many opportunities that are precluded from these students. Furthermore, engineering firm tend not to recruit on campus, so it’s difficult for many students to find jobs in engineering after school. Just a warning, don’t do engineering unless you are 90-100% sure you want to. Don’t try to leverage the engineering degree with the Columbia name.</p>
<p>… thank you everyone…
if i ask them to consider my application as a CC applicant now, wouldnt it increase my chances of getting rejected?</p>
<p>monydad - comparable allows for differentiation, i would never say they are precisely the same, though i knew a few kids from my generation that were not able to transfer from cornell engineering to arts and science, they did do poorly academically - which precipitated their desire to transfer. i would guess of course that transferring would be easier as you noted because of some differences.</p>
<p>nevertheless columbia is closer to cornell, penn in engineering, than it is to harvard, duke, princeton. i think this fact is certainly something we could all agree on.</p>
<p>… i’m scared now :O</p>
<p>"nevertheless columbia is closer to cornell, penn in engineering, than it is to harvard, duke, princeton. i think this fact is certainly something we could all agree on. "</p>
<p>I do not know that much about all these programs, but of these choices I would have thought it is closest to Penn and then Duke. but I could be wrong.</p>
<p>what did you end up deciding? i would stick to SEAS at this point… chances are you’ve built yourself as a math/science engineering student and they might even wonder why you’re applying to CC… additionally they might wonder why you’re applying ED if you’re not even sure about what you want to do in Columbia. It’s fine to go in undecided but generally you’re supposed to know if you want to do engineering.</p>
<p>If you aren’t 100% sure you are going into engineering, I would strongly suggest that you don’t apply ED to SEAS. I know quite a few freshmen in SEAS that have explored different interests and realized that engineering isn’t for them and are trying to transfer next year. It’s very difficult and very competitive.</p>
<p>AdmissionsGeek
Just a note. It is almost impossible for any 18 yr old student to know his/her true passion in life. Pigeon holing a student into his first choice seems very unfair.</p>
<p>I wish I had known about the difficulty of transferring between colleges prior to my son applying. I will not make that mistake with my second child.</p>
<p>My D turned down Columia engineering over just this issue. What if she changed her mind and decided that she didn’t want to do engineering? Everything we had read here on cc and elsewhere indicated that it would be difficult to switch. Fortunately, she had 3 other Ivies and three other top 20 schools to choose from. I really think that Columbia needs to rethink this transferring issue, as they are losing top students.</p>
1 Like
<p>Or, you know, she could have applied to the College. The engineering curriculum is intense and extensive, and the College’s Core Curriculum is extensive as well. It would be very difficult for a student in SEAS to switch to the College and complete the Core curriculum and a major after their first or second year, and vice-versa. There isn’t really anything Columbia can do about that.</p>