Columbia or Duke?

confidentialcoll
Wed, 28 Apr 2010 01:23:13 +0000

As for Columbia, you can enjoy the city - that is if you have the time. From my experience, we, as engineers, are constantly working on problem sets or other forms of work. This is no different from engineers at other schools, but a major selling point (New York City) isn’t really pertinent to engineering students. The fact is that, we can only go out at most once during the entire week and few students who go out regularly do well.



speak for yourself, I have been able to do well in class (as an engineer working on wall street next year), get heavily involved in a few organizations, go into the city 1-2 times a week, sleep a lot and still find time to just chill around campus, go to campus bars, campus events and spend time with friends. If I prioritized the city more, I’d be able to go into the city 3x a week.

It’s a matter of managing time well and working smartly/efficiently. Like taking easier electives, taking requirements with easier profs, getting a head start on assignments, going to office hours to get something clarified before you slave away on a problem set, working in groups and splitting up work, finding the solutions manual so that you don’t spend your entire night on one problem. Getting enough sleep and going to classes that matter, so that you know how to solve problems and what to expect, doing some work during the day on the weekends.

All this allows me to complete problem sets even with a heavy class load and still find time to do everything else. Life would be easier in the college, but aiming to do well in seas does not preclude you from anything. If you want to be valedictorian or take the most difficult classes then you will have to sacrifice a lot. But time management and good strategy goes a long way to minimizing my effort level / time spent doing work without sacrificing gpa.