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joy
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| Joined: | Fri Feb 23rd, 2007 |
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| Posts: | 36 |
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Posted: Sun Mar 23rd, 2008 05:00 am |
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My daughter and I visited Columbia last week, during our spring break, and theirs, too. The fact that you come out of the subway and are at the gates of the college was fantastic for my dd. She definitely wants an urban campus! We found it very easy to travel to the campus-we arrived by train to Penn Station then took the express subway train uptown to 96th, then transferred to the #1. We had a wonderful funny, humble, tour guide who gave a rather quick tour in order to get us back for an info session.
I will add just a couple observations that were not covered in the reviews above. Freshmen stay in one of 4 dorms located right in the center of the campus. There is one dorm that has many singles for freshmen. Our guide had lived there and loved it-he said that it was very social, people usually kept their doors open, but he liked being able sometimes to close his door and have his private space. Housing is guaranteed for all 4 years. I didn't see the dorms where jrs and srs live-they are located a little further away from the center of campus. He did say that all of the dorms are within a 10 min walk.
I was very comfortable with the safety of the campus itself, and on the training the college gives the freshmen about urban safety. My dd loves using public transportation and being in a big city, so she was quite intrigued with the school. During the info session we learned quite a bit about their Core Curriculum. It is fairly intense-the Lit class for example is a one year course, taken by every freshman, with every student reading the same classical work at the same time. There is another one year course in philosophy, religious and political thought taken by all the sophomores. The admissions officer made it clear that this curriculum is not necessarily for everyone, and they are looking for students who really want the classical curriculum, not just students who want to be in New York City. There are 3 other semester courses that are part of the core-a writing course, Art History and Music. This is very different from schools which have more general distribution requirements with lots of choices within the categories.
My dd loved the campus and the location and her sense of the type of students who go there-"independent types" might be a good way to describe them. She's not sure at this point if she wants to have the number of required courses that their curriculum demands.
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joy
Member
| Joined: | Fri Feb 23rd, 2007 |
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| Posts: | 36 |
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Posted: Sun Mar 23rd, 2008 05:05 am |
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I wanted to add some thing that my dd was quite excited about-most Columbia classes are not offered on Fridays, so most students have a 3 day weekend every week, which in the words of our guide, "is a beautiful, beautiful thing." He said that many of the service organizations on campus do community service projects on Fridays. In the info session, the admissions officer mentioned that many students doing internships work 8 hours on Fridays, plus more during the rest of the week.
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