<p>Is this true? It’s the impression and message I get from various people</p>
<p>Can you explain what you think of when you say cohesive? There isn’t some cause that the entire campus rallies around (like basketball at Duke), columbia is also very diverse with people from very different back grounds, with very different life goals, academic and professional interests.</p>
<p>The student body is, on the whole, outgoing. There are quite a few nerdy and introverted kids, but columbia is filled with students who came to take advantage of what NYC and columbia has to offer, I’ve met the most outgoing people I know at Columbia. It isn’t like UChicago or Caltech by any means. “Networking” is a big deal to a lot of people. Whether that’s selling yourself to a members of a club so that they elect you to the executive board or whether it’s meeting with alums and employers at career fairs to get yourself an interview / job. NYC is a loud, dynamic, bustling city and suits extroverted people well. There is a place for introverted intellectuals and Columbia fosters quite a few of those as well, but the average student is more extroverted than introverted.</p>
<p>my main criticism of Columbia was the fact that the student body as a whole chose to explore NYC as opposed to staying on campus and bonding with fellow Columbians(lol).
This is the main point i received from many people (about 5 or 6) who attend the school…some see it as a positive, some a negative.
I see it as a negative.</p>
<p>well like any statement that overgeneralizes about a population, of course it is not completely true. </p>
<p>a) columbians are geekier than your average lot. so with that comes social awkwardness, inability to talk with each other, excessive desires to stay in the library.</p>
<p>b) you have a lot of competing things - on campus there are hundreds of clubs, off campus there are hundreds of ‘clubs.’</p>
<p>c) its a real campus, where folks really do things for the spirit of the school, enjoy hanging out, and as a friend of mine put it - it is more of a lattice of different folks doing different things, but in the end it creates a net of criss-crossing friends where 6 degrees of separation puts you in touch with everyone in the undergraduate schools and gives you life long friends.</p>
<p>i loved columbia because i feel the people were the best part - they were down to earth, but unafraid to call you out when you weren’t pulling your weight, a mixture of support and chiding, it was just a great place to go to school and feel at home.</p>
<p>“There isn’t some cause that the entire campus rallies around (like basketball at Duke)”</p>
<p>There are things that define undergraduate culture (e.g. critical impulse that engenders cynicism and snarky wit), but not all undergraduates buy into the culture. I would like to say that everyone reads Spec and Bwog and comes to Orgo night and the Varsity Show, but that’s not the case. i think the upshot is that there’s a very vibrant undergraduate culture on campus, there are tons of subcultures that surround different groups (sports teams, Greek life, and all kinds of small organizations), and as a student you can adopt whatever attitude you want toward them. You’ll always find some people that share your interests, but you’ll never find an interest that everyone in the undergraduate community shares.</p>
<p>“my main criticism of Columbia was the fact that the student body as a whole chose to explore NYC as opposed to staying on campus and bonding with fellow Columbians(lol).”</p>
<p>You could worry about that, but it’s pretty much ********. Very few students are always heading downtown; most go down occasionally. The issue with Columbia nightlife is that not a lot happens literally ON CAMPUS; people hang out in their friends’ dorm rooms, go to bigger parties in frat houses or East Campus, go downtown, or hit the local bars, but you have to know that something is going on in order to go. There’s never a party that everyone on campus goes to.</p>
<p>The only peer schools I found us to be geekier than: were upenn and stanford (duke perhaps as well). The rest like brown, williams, amherst, yale, harvard, princeton, cornell were about as geeky. Uchicago, MIT, caltech, jhu, carnegie mellon kids were all geekier.</p>
<p>“The lattice” is great analogy, definitely far fewer than six degrees.</p>
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<p>this is fairly true, I did however go to some downright awesome east campus and claremont parties during my time, they happened more junior and senior year, when I was deeply involved with a couple of organizations, when I was being invited to more places than I could physically be at. Freshman year was quieter, more room and floor get togethers, a few of which got quite crazy. It’s true that you have to know where to go / know people throwing parties, but this is an organic process that only improves with time. Coming onto to campus it can be a little intimidating when your orientation acquaintance invites some people in your group, whom they get along slightly better with, to their dorm party but not you.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the helpful responses!</p>