Columbia or UPENN ?

Denzera
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:18:52 +0000

It’s a toss-up. What I will say is that my absolute favorite course at Columbia was taught by the university president himself, Lee Bollinger. It was on Freedom of Speech and Press, of which he is a leading scholar (recently defended two cases in front of the supreme court), and it was taught exactly like a law school class. Absolutely fascinating experience, and WindowShopping will agree with me. I damn near went to law school because of it, and why I didn’t had nothing to do with opportunity.

It’s also worth noting that west philly is a pretty nasty place to be. I’ve talked to police officers at the 18th district in philly for my own little research on this - there is a ton of drug activity starting about 5 blocks west of campus, and higher per-capita property crime on campus than at columbia. You leave campus at columbia and you get… more restaurants and bars. You gotta go more than a mile to get into sketchy territory (i.e. the 140s and broadway, or east of Lexington ave…). I’m not trying to scare you or anything - it’s not exactly the Gaza Strip over there - but location is definitely one of the selling points of columbia and it’s a differentiator.

There is an accelerated 3-3 program between CC/SEAS and CLS, the AILE program, that will nearly guarantee admission if you clear their (high) barriers. And if you don’t, I still know plenty of people who went from CC to CLS without incident. It’s definitely very frequent to see people go to top-5 law schools coming out of columbia undergrad. I can’t speak to Penn.

If you can get in touch with WindowShopping, he can tell you more about the political science dept at columbia, since I believe he’s the only PoliSci major on the board at the moment.