Is Columbia right for me?

giwook
Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:33:44 +0000

It depends on what you want to do post graduation. If finance/business is it, then Columbia offers you better opportunities because of its location.

Yes, Columbia does lack in school spirit when it comes to athletics. Namely because Ivy League athletics in general is not exactly something to write home about (unless you’re talking about Princeton’s lacrosse team, Harvard’s basketball team, which still pale in comparison to Duke basketball). But the lack of school spirit at Columbia can also be attributed to the location of the school.

The campus is not much of a campus, it’s really just a few blocks that are gated off from the city, which is an overly simplistic description, but you get my point. The location of the school has both pro’s and con’s. The benefits of going to a school in the city such as Columbia is all of the professional opportunities you will have, not to mention the diversity of the culture. There are few cities in the world that can compare to New York City. But at the same time, it’s New York City, so you’re not going to have a sprawling 20-acre campus. It’s up to you to decide what is more important: having fun for a few years on campus while attending a top 10 or 15 school, or whatever Duke is ranked nowadays, or setting yourself up for greater professional opportunities in the long run by attending a top 5 school like Columbia with the Ivy League pedigree.

And regarding what cc2015student said, the school spirit she refers to (regarding athletics, “orgo night”, etc) is not really school spirit per se… it’s simply extracurricular activities that are available at most four-year institutions. Let me set the record straight. The experience is what YOU make of it. And I think that you need to think hard about what it is about school spirit at Duke that makes you want to go there, and you need to consider what you’ll be sacrificing in order to be able to get student season tickets to Duke basketball and football games.

I think that Columbia alum are just as excited and enthusiastic about their school as Duke alum are of theirs. It’s just that school spirit is manifested differently at both schools. While Duke is a prestigious school and academically rigorous, you seem to be fixating on the athletics at Duke. I went to University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) before transferring to Columbia and I can tell you, going to a D1 school with great teams in the major sports is awesome. But in the end, it doesn’t really help you once you graduate. And yeah, graduating with a Duke degree isn’t anything to scoff at. But graduating with a Columbia degree is more impressive based on name recognition alone.

What if YOU were the employer and you had to pick between two identical resumes, one from a Duke student and one from a Columbia student? Who would you pick?