<p>I can’t really answer about the IB Diploma. My school has it, and I’ve taken some IB classes, and I know the IB Diploma can be pretty challenging depending on course selection, but not sure how Columbia views it. My “guess” is that, it’ll mostly be your Higher Level courses that matter. SL courses are like honors - no credit from Columbia - while you do get credit for HL courses. In most cases, you get more credit - 6 credits versus the usual 3 credits (for example, only 3 credits for a 5 on AP Eng. Lit or Lang, but you get 6 for IBHL English if you get a 6 or 7) - for HL IB courses than you do AP courses, and in all other cases, it’s tied. On the other hand, classes are classes. </p>
<p>I honestly don’t see how being a regular IB Diploma candidate will give you a leg up on a similar decent AP student. If you finished your IB Diploma in junior year or something, perhaps, but then again, if an AP student finished 9+ AP’s by their junior year, similar effect.</p>
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<p>Concerning EC’s, my personal view is that it’s how you write about them and their impact on you that really matters in most cases. Sure, if you’re state/national something, internationally known, built some amazing apparatus, etc. … that will really make a difference.</p>
<p>But in most general cases, most qualified applicants have a good number of EC’s, usually including leadership, service, sports, internships, etc. In these circumstances, when you don’t have an EC that is without a doubt completely superior, it’s what you got out of what you did and how it all made you into who you are - and hopefully someone Columbia would like to have in their next class - that’s most important.</p>
<p>And to be serious, there’s no true “quality” EC… it’s really up to you what’s important (as corny as that sounds) and how you make of it.</p>
<p>It is up to you whether you want to write about your EC’s in your essays. For myself, in my main essay, I linked a personal experience, to one initiative I took in the leadership of one of EC’s, to how I matured and became the person I am today. In a separate additional essay, I talked briefly about one experience in another EC of mine and how I learned/matured/changed from it. In both circumstances, I never bothered to explain my EC’s, I simply talked about one of my experiences in each respective EC and how I learned from it/matured (along with subtle insinuations at my competency in the EC of course : P). Simply writing about your EC, or talking about what you have achieved in it, without a “So What?”, isn’t going to be helpful in your application in my opinion.</p>
<p>It worked for me, but I’m me and you are you. You may choose to go for a completely different approach in which you do not mention your EC’s in your essays at all, and that will be completely valid (and perhaps even better).</p>
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<p>Anyways, my one real suggestion, which isn’t really related, is to start your essays early and begin applying early to some rolling schools (ie. Rose-Hulman/UMich for me) that you might be interested. If you get in, you’ll get comforting news sometime in November which will make the college process a whole lot more relaxing to you as you already know you have one (or several) schools that you’ll be interested in going to that you can go to for sure. It will also let you have a lot of good practice in revising your essays and will make your final essays that you might send to Columbia stronger. For examples, in each segment I applied to my schools, my essays kept on changing and changing until finally, when I applied to Columbia (just a day before the deadline, heh), my final essays were completely different from my first essays, but they were also what I felt to be the strongest essays. Sure, if you’re a super hard-working self-motivator on college apps, you can constantly revise your essays to make them better. I’m not and thus for me, my significant changes and improvements came with the necessity of changing my essays for different school’s requirements (and new reflections/interpretations then).</p>
<p>Anyways, good luck.</p>