<p>I like how people will come in trying to paint columbia students as having no sense of community because they’re always running around new york doing their own thing - and then others saying that columbia students stay on campus, and therefore don’t make use of their city.</p>
<p>some people will criticize anything, no matter how irrational.</p>
<p>In interests of staying on topic, the odds of a random columbia student going south of 96th st less often than a tufts student in Somerville takes the red line into Boston, is something like 5%. Seriously. I grew up pretty close to Tufts. I worked in cambridge for years before attending columbia. There is no freaking comparison in terms of atmosphere. Columbia is an urban school. Tufts is a suburban school - though somewhat close to the urbs.</p>
<p>I’d exercise by biking down the west side bikepath, from 116th to battery park and back. You go through the full gamut of neighborhoods, views, and of course have the river on your side at all times (and even a few trees at the beginning and end). That’s taking advantage of the city. You try and do that at Tufts, you’ll get run over by the traffic heading to I-93. The nearest open bikepath that doesn’t involve you getting mauled by crazed cambridge drivers (and I used to be one of them) is Memorial Drive. Which is to say, miles of narrow one-way streets away.</p>
<p>Schools in boston that are more closely integrated with boston itself than columbia is with NYC:</p>
<ul>
<li>BU</li>
<li>Emmanuel</li>
<li>Suffolk Law</li>
</ul>
<p>None of the rest are any closer to, say, the North End or Lansdowne St than Columbia is to Greenwich Village. You can argue MIT since it’s just across the bridge, but it’d be a tough sell.</p>
<p>Sorry, dcircle, not buying it.</p>