Shifting from Columbia Engineering to Columbia College

monydad
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 17:12:45 +0000

:…it is more comparable to Penn or Cornell, which do not allow easy flow. "

Depends on what you mean by “comparable”. and “easy flow”. It’s true that at Cornell one does have to apply for intercollege transfer, but if you’ve been doing decently overall, and particulary in your arts & sciences courses, it isn’t a huge problem to transfer to Arts from engineering. Or at least it wasn’t when I did this myself, years ago. An adcom comment I heard this summer leads me to suspect it is basically the same now; the most likely circumstance that would cause a problem is if you haven’t been doing well, esp in your CAS courses. But absent performance issues it isn’t considered an “impacted major” situation or anything, this transfer route is not that rare, or that hard.

As for “comparable” I could be mistaken but I thought Cornell’s engineering college was quite a bit larger. I imagine there are many other differences, eg The Core, proportion of students who go on to work in engineering, other things.