laloopie

thanks for the advice.. i am currently trying/ tried to join some clubs.. i tried out for A dance team, and I didnt get into that. ( insanely hard to get onto dance teams) ..then I tried out to be a com. member for some other club ( which i will not name) and didnt get into that club either! socially, everyone is alway working ( they're in butler 24-7), and during the night they all hit up Nachos, West-End, the Heights and drink till they puke.

Now, don't get me wrong...i am a work-a-holic myself and I'm not a party animal... but this has gone too far. SAC what groups should I join...i dont want to join a frat/sorority to have a solid group of friends..... is it too late for me to join some groups??

Workload is okay, but as days go by it has been increasingly difficult to meet people here.

and.. yes, on top of it all my love life is LACKING!

for all you prospective female columbia cc or seas first years...from my experience all the barnard girls get the columbia guys...

which sucks enormous amounts of elephant butt.
sorry im ranting.
hopefully my life at columbia will improve.
and my dorm room sucks and is insanely small.
and i miss my family.
i feel depressed.

and im sick of alcohol.


and i have a COLD.

imiracle911

laloopie check ur private message.

garland

Laloopie--sorry to hear you're not feeling well. I hope you get over your cold soon.

My S was a frosh last year; he lived in JJ and his floor really bonded and most of them did lots of stuff together. Maybe you could look around your dorm and find the floor where that's happening, sometimes some floors are duds and some aren't.

Like others have said, look for groups to join. last fall, my S was in the marching band, though he decided not to this year. I know there are lots of clubs that you don't have to get picked to join. Like, he was talking about the culinary club, which sounds like a little cooking and a lot of eating. There's the newspaper, intramural sports, and lots of other things.

And, he's in CC and dating a CC girl, so never fear. There may be more girls in BC, but there are more guys in SEAS, so it all evens out.

sac

Having a cold certainly can bring you down! But no, it's absolutely not too late to join clubs. Go check things out that sound even vaguely interesting. I might be wrong, but I think there's a games club, which is basically people just showing up to play board games. I don't know your background or interests, but there are lots of ethnic clubs, political clubs, groups that do community work that ALWAYS need a hand. Can you try a type of dancing you haven't done -- something you don't have to audition for?

Why don't you talk to your RA about what's out there and tell him or her how you're feeling. Part of an RA's job is to try to help first years connect. Are there any older students from your high school or your home town you could ask for advice about how to find your niche? (I think older students like to give advice, to show off how much they know their way around campus.)

Garland's advice is also sound. My son was in the social dorm last year, but on a floor that didn't seem to gel. He found a different floor and kind of became an unofficial member, so much so that people used to push that button for him in the elevator and didn't believe him when he said that wasn't the floor he lived on. (He's also in CC and dating a CC woman, by the way, so don't give up hope about those CC guys).

You are definitely not alone! Friendships don't necessarily happen right away, let alone love life. Even people who look as if they've made friends for life in the first month are likely to have a different set of friends by the end of the year. As far as everyone studying goes, are any of your classes the type that lend themselves to study groups? Those can also become social. I'm sure you'll feel better when you're feeling healthier. Maybe even your classes will pick up. (Another thought -- if you have time on your hands, have you looked into getting a small job on campus. Look on the Lerner site, for example, since working there might give you another way to meet people.)

greencloth

I have a question: Is Columbia elitist?
I was just wondering if the atmostphere is rather stratified or not.

sac

If you mean WASPS literally, no, there are tons of Asians and probably the largest percentage of Jewish students in the Ivy League. But, as is true at proabably all private universities, the diversity is more ethnic than economic.

imiracle911

sac i have a question

i'm thinking about EDing to Columbia College but then again after i visited Swarthmore i'm kind of unsure.

how is the advising system there? i heard that it wasn't good but how much help can u get from like students there? I have heard that there is not much access to professors how much is true? For science classes when can u start research with a professor(actual research not TA) u said that the social scene was bad. Is there a sense of unity in the school? i know the alumni donation rate is low. can u say that this is because of a bad experience at columbia? how r most of the class sizes? on record i heard that there were only a few big ones. r there writing coaches that help u? r u alone in doing ur own paper or is most of the assistance from students?

my basic reasons for EDing to columbia were
the suburban campus but urban surrounding
core curriculum
Double-major program(3+2 for cc and SEAS)

but those questions have made me rethink CC.

blah1111

I'm a sophomore here, and I find the advising system at Columbia to be pretty good (and rightly so, Columbia College has 4000 students in it). My advisor knows me by name. Hell, her SECRETARY knows me by name. 'Nuff said. Students who know the ropes can obviously provide useful advising info too.

All core curriculum classes (Lit Hum, Art Hum, Music Hum, University Writing, Contemporary Civilizations, foreign language, and most Major Cultures classes) are all approximately 20:1. Classes that everyone and their mothers take (eg, principles of econ) will have up to 300 students. But others have four or five (or even one!). I think the average class size, when you get into your major, will be around 15-20. However, the science departments have an amazing student:faculty ratio, which is definitely a pull-factor for future chemists/physicists.

I don't really know what you mean by "actual research not TA." TA's are graduate students who, believe it or not, do serious research for their dissertation. They just have teaching fellowships at Columbia to pay for tuition. Very rarely can undergraduates be TA's. If you want to do research, it's actually very easy to get a job; three of my friends have research positions with actual Columbia professors. The student-faculty ratio for physics majors at Columbia College is 2:3 -- yes, that means that there are more physics professors than undergraduate physics majors. This makes research very easy to find.

I don't think the social scene on campus is necessarily bad, just kind of different. I lived in a very social dorm in my freshman year, and we became a pretty close-knit floor. I'm not really sure what you mean by "unity"... does it have something to do with school spirit? Do you want students to express their love for Columbia on a daily basis? I think students here enjoy their Columbia experience on a more subtle level; I agree with anyone who says that students here don't have that "ra-ra" feeling, but when you evaluate yourself, you're going to have to ask yourself the question "Is that necessary?" To me, it's really not (I find it kind of obnoxious). This very well may be the reason alumni donations are so low, but that's hardly indicative of alumni's amount of satisfaction with their undergraduate career.

Of course, just like at any college, there'll be students who don't like it here. To take that kind of anecdotal evidence to heart is kind of flawed.

imiracle911

thnx blah1111 by "TAing for research" i meant just like collecting data and doing the crummy stuff instead of actually participating in the whole research.
ok thnx for the advising comment. B/c i sort of felt that CC didn't have a good organized advisor type of thing.
I have some other questions. How much participation do students have when it comes to administration decisions? i read the columbia paper on the Columbia250 anniversary events and how it was really inaccessible to students. Would u say this is a common thing in Columbia? Also what i mean by unity is like not just everyone going on their own but like the floor doing things together and having a sense of community in the whole school even after graduation.
Also how is the alumni connection after graduation? i'm just curious how it will be after graduation.
also do u know anything about LOAF the store that provides organic food? How many people actually cook their food? thanx

oh yeh and a weird question. i heard that some years before i think two or three years before the TAs went on strike so the final exams were postponed or sth like that. Does that happen frequently?

sac

imiracle -- I'm a parent, not a student, but in my suggestions for the student who was unhappy her first month there, I certainly didn't mean to leave the impression the social life was lacking, because my sophomore kid tells me he's had a great first year and is having a blast this year.

There is an advising system, which he has not made use of, so I don't think he's given it much of a chance. I assume this will change once he declares his major, because then he will have a faculty advisor. There is a summer research program run through the biology department, but open to other majors as well, and I think you can apply beginning in freshman year. Alumni giving is rising significantly. Columbia was slow to get into the "game" of establishing and nurturing an alumni network, but now is definitely active on that front. The TA strike is not just a Columbia thing (Yale, Penn, NYU, etc are all confronting this issue) but since the strike two years ago there has been a court decision in favor of the university administrations' stands. This past year there was a pretty much a brief, symbolic action, with no exams or grades put in jeopardy.

Judging by the Spectator, the relationship with the administration is still not warm. I don't know how much impact this has on the day to day life of most students. I do know that when they have world leaders on campus, as they have every fall, those events are accessible to students.

As for class size, my son's have ranged from 6 (music) to 300 (intro classes in econ), with his core classes at 22 and most others around 40 or 50. In the core classes, especially LitHum and University Writing (which I think has 12 students), you are encouraged, if not required, to rewrite papers. His LitHum teacher expected them to see her at least twice a semester to talk about their papers, but encouraged them to consult her as often as they wanted. Because of this, he never explored whether or not there is a writing center, but I assume there is one, just as there are math and physics help rooms. If you think you know what types of courses you might be interested in, you can look at the online bulletin and see the actual course enrollments. The core guarantees you that you will have at least one small class every semester of the first two years. Beyond that, it really varies by department with econ being the worst (something the department hopes to remedy with the 10 new faculty they've hired this year)

One note about class size -- it's only one measure. My son's friend who goes to a great LAC had an intro econ class of about 30, but said it was a lecture class and students attended because they were required too. My son said in his intro class of over 200, the professor actually engaged the students in discussion, even though my son would have been just as happy to hear the professor, who was a great lecturer, do all the talking. The core classes, on the other hand, are designed to be discussion classes. Their quality varies not just with the teacher, but with how seriously the students in that particular section take it. So far, my kid's had good luck with his fellow students in both LitHum and Contemporary Civ.

I hope I answered all your questions, and that more students like blah111 chime in and correct me about anything I've gotten wrong.

shizz

I am a grad student and am TAing here, so I won't publicly comment about the education or the students, but I can make a comparison to my ugrad school Cornell.

The administration at Columbia is really bad and is mired by tons of red tape and ineptitude. I've had nothing but bad experiences with them.

The campus is gorgeous. It's very small and compact so when you walk around, it's kind of nice seeing a bunch of people everywhere. Also, it's nice not having to walk 20 minutes just to get to class. It's very easy to be where you need to be.
However, campus is usually dead on the weekeneds. It seems that all the undergrads disperse around the city. I guess it's nice if you LOVE the city, but I liked it in ugrad when I could walk around a small college town and run into a bunch of people at bars or at house parties. I guess the party scene is different. I'm not saying one is worse than the other - it's all about personal prefs - but there seems to be a lack of the "traditional" college experience.

Let's see, what else... professors here are very accessible but you'll find that at any top school to be honest with you.

The libraries close really early. It's actually a big problem and a big pain in the neck for me because I have no money to buy books so I constantly have to check out books from the reserve.

The gym facilities are nice and the hours are great. It gets pretty crowded though but the equipment and facilities are very good.

It's reallly expensive living here. The only way to get a cheap drink is to go during happy hours. Restaurants here rip you off and the quality isn't worth the money at most of them.

laloopie

shizz i would say thats a pretty accurate description.

JohnnyK

What's the median price of a hot dog in NYC?

shizz

sketchy hot dogs are $1

mardad

Saturday night about 40 Barnard and Columbia freshmen went to see Madame Butterfly for free at the Met.