Introduction
It was nightfall when I arrived on the Columbia University. I had recently moved from Los Angeles and was a senior in high school, visiting my cousin who was a student at the engineering school. Even though the sun had already set, there was a dazzling haze of light emanating from the campus buildings.
They looked just as intellectual as I had anticipated, and with their red bricks and copper roofs, they were imposing. “What’s a poor girl from a Mexican neighborhood in L.A. doing at Columbia?” was my initial thinking. It’s Ivy League.
I now realize there was nothing I couldn’t do in college after graduating from Columbia University with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree and landing a solid job in New York, nearly seven years later. I am the independent, self-assured person Columbia desired.
One city inside the City is Columbia University. A small college inside a vast academic setting, Columbia College is one of the university’s four undergraduate institutions on its Morningside Heights campus in upper Manhattan.
Based on its distinctive core curriculum, its liberal arts heritage seeks to develop students who are not only knowledgeable about facts but also about how the world works, how social and political issues impact individuals, and how to think critically—a skill that is essential for today’s youth leaders.
Established as King’s College
Established as King’s College in 1754, at the time when America was still a collection of colonies under English dominion, the school was the first to offer higher education in the province of New York at the time. Its first alumni included John Jay, who would later become the first chief justice of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, who would later become the first secretary of the Treasury.
After being suspended during the American Revolution, Columbia College reopened in 1784 under a new charter that removed any references to the church or the state. It continues to be the oldest independent university in the nation.
The student body at Columbia is as diverse now as the leaves of fall in Central Park. Beginning coed in the early 1980s, the student body comprises individuals from over forty different nations and all fifty states. With representation from every ethnicity, culture, and religion, the school is built on tolerance and understanding and is able to embrace its variety. All of this is contained within the borders of New York City, the country’s first melting pot.
The kids at Columbia blended in perfectly with the busy area. A stroll along College Walk, the school’s major thoroughfare, could take one past a group of students rocking to hip-hop music on the steps of Low Library, the main administration building, or two students arguing over how hell looks in Dante’s Inferno. Because Columbia values diversity so highly within its student body, the college’s admissions process gives potential applicants plenty of chances to showcase their identities, passions, and goals.
Academics
The demanding core curriculum at Columbia University, which consists of a number of prerequisite courses focused on the contributions of Western civilization to the modern world, is what unites the diverse student body at the university. Students exposed to the writings of Homer, Plato, Beethoven, Picasso, and other greats through the core, which created following World War I and quickly imitated by many other institutions.
No seminar class has more than twenty-two people, which enhances the core classes’ exposure to the greatest works of philosophy, literature, history, art, music, and science. Students expected to participate in intellectual observation, debate, comparison, and analysis in such a small setting as a means of preparing for the life of the worldly freethinker Columbia wants all of its students to become.
The two pillars of the core, commonly referred to as Lit Hum and CC (Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization), are one-year courses that typically completed in the first two years at Columbia University. While students may bemoan the length of each course (two hours twice a week for a whole year!) or the enormous quantity of reading they will have to do for homework, they will also lament the lack of time allotted to each task.
First year at Columbia
During my first year at Columbia University, I made the error of taking CC instead of Lit Hum, as advised. You could say that rather than out of pure intellectual interest, I was more driven to learn about the course material by intimidation and terror. Having completed their first year of Lit Hum, the sophomores in my class were confident and skillful debaters of both our authors’ and their own ideas.
I completed my first term paper in a few hours the night before it due, so maybe that’s why I failed at it and asked to redo it. However, via my rewriting, I quickly and hard learnt how to analyze Plato’s Republic and come up with an argument that made sense. I had to entirely abandon the study techniques that helped me get by in high school, and I came to the realization that everyone at Columbia was intelligent and that we were all on equal footing.
Teachers for both Lit Hum and CC frequently use the Socratic method to present a lesson, encouraging the “disputatious learning” that Columbia values so highly. Students will study literary topics and philosophy in class, exchanging ideas and viewpoints, but they will also swiftly develop the ability to defend their own opinions on an individual basis. and effectively defend them, which is why it is usually glaringly clear in class when a student has not completed the assigned reading.
Admissions
A diverse student body from different geographic, social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds valued at Columbia College because of the range of viewpoints and ideas that each student can bring to a class. As a result, both qualitative and quantitative criteria used by Columbia to determine which applicants to accept. Admissions officers are searching for extracurricular activities, maturity and leadership qualities, as well as an applicant’s unique interests, talents, or hobbies, in addition to strong high school grades.
Out of the 15,000 applications received in the previous year, just 1,633 accepted, representing an admission percentage of 10.9 percent. Although the chances are slim, the general rule of thumb is that the stronger one’s intellectual passion, the better. Applications also strongly encouraged from those who have a strong interest in astronomy, math, physics, or chemistry.
I believe that attitude is more important to Columbia admissions officers than skill. Although I never performed particularly well on standardized tests and did not perform particularly well on the SATs, I was an involved student in high school, participating in two sports, attending a poetry club, and serving as the class vice president. My English lessons went well, and I decided early on that I would pursue a more literary major in college. It certainly helped that I received some guidance and felt like I did well in my admissions interview.
