<p>What about Columbia made you choose it over other schools?
(of particular interest--any overlap with the University of Chicago?)</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>bump
i’d like to hear as well</p>
<p>I know of many people who considered UChicago before coming to Columbia, but I’m not one of them. My top choice was Columbia, and my second choice was Brown, followed NYU. I also flirted with Georgetown, Vassar, and Johns Hopkins, with Fordham as a safety.</p>
<p>I applied to Columbia ED and got in, so that was that. If I hadn’t gotten in ED, I would have applied to all the schools above. I probably would have gone to Brown if I got in, but otherwise would likely have ended up at NYU.</p>
<p>Looked at Harvard, Yale, MIT, Penn, Dartmouth and Williams. Applied ED to Columbia. </p>
<p>If I hadn’t gotten in, I would’ve applied RD to Harvard, Yale, MIT, Dartmouth and safeties and would have gone to Yale, if I had gotten in (over Harvard and the others). </p>
<p>I took Penn (didn’t like vibe, quality wasn’t there) and Williams (too small) off final list. </p>
<p>Chicago held no appeal.</p>
<p>What about Columbia attracted you to apply ED over all those other places?</p>
<p>My girlfriend, a year older than me, goes to Harvard so I know it pretty well. I saw Columbia as a more rigorous place academically, and I liked the idea of the Core</p>
<p>Liked New York better than New Haven, though I loved the Yale campus, especially the residential colleges. I thought too that the sciences I was interested in were better at Columbia than Yale. </p>
<p>MIT was a bit single-threaded for me, though I liked it a lot. I thought Columbia would afford me a better liberal arts education than MIT, especially as a science guy. </p>
<p>So among these four schools, I felt that Columbia was the best fit for me academically, liked the campus and liked New York. </p>
<p>To be honest, I would have been happy at any of these schools, as different as they may seem.</p>
<p>I also could have been happy at Williams, Dartmouth, UVA, Berkeley, etc. I am pretty opened-minded. I think I could have found a lot to like at many of these schools. </p>
<p>I do not see myself as a “type” looking for a “type school”. I didn’t focus on rankings. I didn’t agonize over the ED decision, just did it.</p>
<p>I looked at Princeton, Williams, Yale, Chicago, Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, Penn, Dartmouth, and a few other schools.</p>
<p>For me Columbia just had the academic vibes that I was looking for, mixed with an urban, sophisticated feel and a quick pace pumped in by NYC. They say NYC is where the most ambitious people in the world flock towards, and I definitely feel that’s the case with Columbia (other top schools send their best students in hoards after graduation, of course, but I’m not the type to sit around for 4 years waiting for the action 
)</p>
<p>Chicago lived up to its nerdy stereotype, and Penn, Duke, Dartmouth, Northwestern didn’t have that intellectual spirit that I was looking for. And then I feel like Princeton students live in a bubble, which really truly affects the experience-- people there are less politically active, less passionate about what they do in general. I will admit that I did love Stanford and Yale about equally as much as Columbia, but at that point it’s all about fit.</p>