Columbia or Duke?

confidentialcoll
Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:05:29 +0000

Fastfood - I think as a freshman you’ll find your peers caught up in intellectual debate and exercise for the heck of it, many with dreams of getting a phd. Then, with a combination of lucrative jobs available, getting tired of academia and becoming more rounded, you see many peers transition to being more pre-professional. There’s usually a point in soph / junior year when you ask yourself what the ■■■ you’re actually going to do to earn living. At this point many of your intellectual friends, will sell their souls to wall street, law firms, medical research, bar tending, publishing etc. As a senior I have seen that transition in a ton of my friends who now plan to go to law school / med-school / MBA / become an entrepreneur/ engineer / work in finance etc. These were the same people I would debate philosophy or religion or literature with until 4am freshman year.

Columbia is definitely an intellectual school, but there are huge numbers of people who are (even if secretly) pre-professional. I know a few really smart, well respected and well-liked anti-intellectual people at Columbia, who do not have the patience for useless theoretical discussion. I also don’t think that being pre-professional and intellectual are mutually exclusive, only in the extreme they are - I consider myself decently intellectual and now very pre-professional. U Chicago (for example) is definitely less pre-professional than Columbia. The least pre-professional schools are LACs like Reed and Bard, where almost everyone is just around to learn for the sake of learning.