Columbia or Duke?

admissionsgeek
Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:31:11 +0000

hey beard - yep not an engineer, i am pretty explicit about this in many posts, but i know engineers, their curriculum and also what their weekly life is like.

i think your 15-25 hrs is pretty accurate. though i am not quite daunted by that number.

i will offer as counterpoint friends who were BME, MechE, ChemE, Applied Math and Financial Engineering - every single one of them graduated in the engineering version of PBK, most were heavily involved in student life (all served on the engineering student council among other activities), graduated with GPA’s north of 3.6, went out a few nights a week and were probably my best friends at school and when they went out they let loose like everyone else. out of the lot i’d say only one of them is a true genius, the rest got by on hard work. today most are in financial services/consulting or something of the like, with one kid doing an md/phd. all brilliant kids who in the end love columbia probably more than most because they were able to experience it fully.

sure there were some nights that they disappeared into someone’s suite to work all night on a problem set (as someone that only worked during the school week it was always a bit weird to be out on a saturday while friends were in), and engineering as well as the natural sciences there is a higher bar for minimal work - if you don’t do it you’re screwed; humanities there are greater variants of course to get away with a decent grade (but i’d say i worked 15-20 hrs on school work to get the GPA i got, too). in the end quant courses are additive often, you need to know A to know Z, so daily prep is mandatory, and it is what makes eng courses seem more daunting because you can’t take a pset off. but if you follow concoll’s position, stay on top of everything, make sure you ask when you need help, it is entirely manageable even for the most difficult of majors.

and as you put it there are tons of stuff you’ve picked up that really just are going to make you better in the long run.