Claire1016

nathan you are the biggest tool ever. LMFAO.

you make me puke a little.

nastynate0315

to cool for school claire as usaual.

drownergurl29

Aw man I feel like Charles Babbage, but Columbia is in Morningside Heights, they haven't expanded to Harlem yet.

chloe33p

I went to visit Columbia this summer(2008). I expected urban and busy atmosphere that New York has, but stepping into the campus really felt like I was at a different world. The campus had safe and clean environment..the buildings are also beautiful.
I wish I visited during actual school year, but summer tour was pretty good too.

Claire1016

Also, it's ginsberg. Idiot.

skipsmom

We were very put off by the shabby appearance of Columbia... trash everywhere, broken pavement, dirty, peeling paint on the window frames. The gym facility is a joke compared to most other schools. We were not allowed to see a dormitory (not surprised, given the condition of the place) and were, in general, very put off by the whole, "we're too intelligent to worry about mundane things such as cleanliness" vibe.

The place has an eerie, post-apocalyptic feel, almost as if it had been standing with no maintenance for 100 years. I guess that's about what has happened, except that it isn't abandoned.

Our tour guide was a giggly, self-absorbed twit. The student speaker at the information session was about as interesting as drying paint. He said nothing that doesn't appear (in much better grammar) on the website. The place was packed, since they don't take reservations, and it was difficult to hear.

We weren't impressed and hope our son doesn't apply there.

confidentialcoll

^good stuff, while most of that is untrue, it's clear from your post that columbia doesn't actually fit you. If it fits your son I hope he applies and you allow him to do so.

Talk to anyone else on campus or who's visited campus and they'll tell you that dirty with deteriorating building are the last descriptors which come to mind. The gym, while small serves it's purpose well, no-one deems it completely inadequate. If you felt this way - so be it, I've just never heard that before in my time at Columbia.

pbr

skipsmom, I live in a pristine, upper-middle class suburb on the west coast. I grew up in pristine Boulder, CO in the 60s-70s. I have lived in many places in between, all of which (except one) share the common characteristic of a "best place to live." The one exception was graduate school in the late 70s, at NYU, when NYC was a total dump. I moved to New York in the middle of a late summer, hot, humid garbage strike, endured the crime/garbage spree of Mayor Koch, and bought a cheap bike to commute during the subway strike. The contrast between Columbia today, and Columbia then, is striking. My younger son, who visited Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and Columbia (among others), decided while on the Columbia campus that Columbia was the place to be. He applied ED and, thank God, got admitted. Was it my choice? No, but I'm not the one spending the next four years on a college campus. I enjoy spending a few days every year in Augusta, GA, but I would not want to spend the next four years there. If my son did, however, I would totally support him.

skipsmom

Why so defensive? Surely there is room for dissenting opinion; after all, it IS opinion people are expressing. The academics are faultless, but then the visit rating isn't about academics, is it?

I'm not sure what part of my impression of Columbia you deem untrue---did you sit in on the very same information session? Meet the same tour guide? If you were there and shared the very same experiences, I'd be very interested in your impressions. Otherwise, you are negating an experience with your emotion. It's clear that you can't imagine anyone wouldn't like Columbia. I have news for you: there are probably others who didn't like it but for obvious reasons they wouldn't post it here!

Our son will be making his own decision about where he wants to attend college. You needn't worry about him

PBR, I didn't see your reply at first. We lived in NYC for seven years (spanning mayoralities of Koch, Dinkins and Guiliani)and I am well acquainted with the problems inherent in life there. I love New York and would love for our son to go to school there, and have no problem with the Columbia curriculum, professors, or any of the wonderful aspects of the education. I really don't see why calling it dirty and unkempt is such a problem, since that was my impression on the day that I went to see it. Our tour guide WAS a ditz, and the information session was a bomb. I wasn't the only one who though this, btw; several parents kept rolling their eyes at the tour guide and one asked those in the near vicinity, "When will she stop talking about herself and start talking about the school?" Several---and by that I mean four or five----parents complained in our small group about the information session, too.

I mention these things because I am not a malcontent, intent on defaming Columbia.

And the tour guide at NYU talked so much about himself that one man wondered if we were supposed to hire him or adopt him at the end of the tour, lol!

pbr

skipsmom, I appreciate that your day on campus was different from mine. I was there on a sunny early-March weekday, when all were filled with hope that winter was over. And perhaps I was looking at the campus through the Koch goggles I acquired while living in New York. As a veteran of campus visits, however, it's difficult to imagine that Columbia presented to you such an unsavory option. Perhaps it was the weather, but Harvard and Dartmouth seemed grungy during our visit. Yale and Columbia, on the other hand, were clean and charming.

I understand that your guide may have been a ditz (although as an old guy, it seems that most young'uns are afflicted with valley speak). Aren't most of them?

Given the chasm between NYU's graduate and undergraduate populations (then and now), I have no comment on your statement regarding the NYU tour guide.

skipsmom

Our visits were full of surprises, I'll be the first to concede that, PBR!

confidentialcoll

skipsmom, here's the problem:

ok, you claim that I was not in your shoes, and i agree to this, the info sessions probably was mundane bs, and the tour guide could very well have been ditzy, But trash everywhere!? where was this?, stones and tiles having gaps between them = pavement broken? or where was this broken pavement? and I haven't seen or don't notice peeling paint on window frames. You are either lying or greatly exaggerating minor problems which I'm sure are present at other schools.

People who dislike columbia are welcome to post here, and do all the time, they just tend to have reasons which actually fit in with our perception of Columbia's flaws (like lack of large open greenspaces on campus, bad weather, adult-like campus, bureaucracy). I too criticize and btch about Columbia a fair deal. I think I'd recognize a lot of the flaws after living here multiple years.

The tour guides are encouraged to tell anecdotal stories and speak from personal experience so that it adds a personal touch to the tour + is easier to defend than a blanket statement about the school. Why it would be such a grave disadvantage is beyond me.

skipsmom

We entered the school from 116th street. The large open area between the Low Library and other buildings directly in a line with it was littered with small bits of paper trash. The large swaths of pavement in areas were cracked and sunken in places, causing uneven surfaces and presenting an unsightly appearance. In several of the buildings the wooden window frames' paint was peeling and this was visible from a distance of 50 yards.

The long hanging gold velvet curtains that separate the domed area from the rest of the building (to protect against the sun, I imagine) were dirty and stained along the bottom and in some places to a height of about four feet.

The carpet in the student gym was old, dirty and stained, and the facility seemed inadequate to serve as many students as Columbia has. It is not the tiniest stretch to say that the gym facilities of most private high schools we toured were far nicer, bigger and better equipped, and I can say categorically that they were ALL cleaner.

Our tour guide knew less about the school outside her discipline than any of the other guides we had at other schools.

I can't be any more specific than that. I take it you are a current student, and can only say that you see Columbia through the eyes of proximity and obvious love of the institution. There's nothing wrong with that, and it doesn't make your observations wrong, just yours. I am still mystified that you are not willing to allow that a visitor might have picked up on flaws that you have not noticed.

Anyway, these issues ARE important to me, as a parent. We are generous donors to all our children's schools and the upkeep of the physical plant happens to be what makes the greatest impression on me. I sit on the boards of two non-profits and when a major upgrade is taken to the physical campus of either one it elicits more favorable public and private response than any programmatic change ever has. You may think that is untrue, or unfortunate, but it is fact.

And I am done with this thread. We came, we visited, I posted.

BOATSHOEINWINTER

Columbia is fierce in every aspect... maybe skipsmom visited "Columbia College" in South Carolina

confidentialcoll

^"fierce" - never heard that before, nice word.