COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Columbia University is a city within the city. Columbia College, one of four undergraduate schools on the university's Morning-side Heights campus in upper Manhattan, is small college within a large academic setting. Its liberal arts tradition, based on its unique core curriculum, aims to produce students learned not only in factual knowledge, but in the ways of the world, the social and political issues that affect people and the critical thinking required for today's young leaders.

Unwed as King's College in 1754, when amerce was still a cluster of colonies ruled by England, the school was the first instruction of higher learning in the then province Of New York. 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.

Suspended during the American Revolution, the school reopened in 1784 as Colombia College, this time rechartered without ties to church or state. It remains the country's oldest independent institution of higher education.

THE SIXTEEN COLLEGES AND SCHOOLS WITHIN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

• Columbia College
• College of Physicians and Surgeons
• School of Law
• The FU Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science
• Graduate School of Arts and Science
• Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
• School of Nursing School of Social Work
• Graduate School of Journalism
• Graduate School of Business
• School of Dental and Oral Surgery
• School of Public Health
• School of International and Public Affairs
• School of General Studies
• School of the Arts
• School of Continuing Education

Today, the face of Columbia’s student body is as variegated as autumn leaves in Center Park. Going coed in the early 1980s, the students come from all fifty state and more that forty different countries. Every race culture, and religious background is represented, which makes for school founded on tolerance and understanding that knows how to celebrate its diversity. All this resides within the framework of New York City, the original melting pot of the nation.

Beyond Columbia’s wrought iron gates lies a city brimming with energy, culture and unforgettable, real-life experiences waiting to happen. Museum Mile, Restaurant Row, Lincoln Center, Broadway, Wall Street, Greenwich Village; upon arriving in New York City, the feeling that it is the center of the world becomes overwhelming! Which is why New York City becomes the perfect accompaniments to an education at Columbia; in many ways, it becomes its own classroom. An arts humanities class (one of the core requirements) might opt to study cathedral architecture inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which is just down the street from campus and which happens to the worlds-largest Gothic-style cathedral. A music humanities class (another core requirement) might understand opera little better by attending Puccini’s La Boehme at tee famed Metropolitan Opera House. A student can visit the New York Exchange to understand the mechanics of economics, and a drama student might learn something about acting technique by catching any number of off-Broadway plays.

But one need onto venture outside Columbia’s campus to breathe in a little culture or excitement. The surrounding Morning-side Heights neighborhood is home to many ethnic restaurants, bookstores, and bars, when one can catch live jazz, stand-up comedy or a local band any night of the week. There is a twenty-four-hour bagel shop and the all-night diner, of Seinfeld fame that has hosted many nocturnal cram sessions. There are pretty reading at cafes, used books being sold at every corner, and perhaps the largest slice of pizza anywhere in the city.

Columbia’s students fit right into the neighborhood’s bustle. During a leisurely stroll down College

Walk, the school’s main thruway, one might pass two students disagreeing over an interpretation of hell in Dander’s Inferno, or a group of students jamming to hip-hop music on the step of Low Library the school’s main administration building.

Such diversity at Columbia is a very valued component of its students body; therefore, the college’s admission process allows prospective students many opportunities to let themselves, their interests, and their aspirations shine through.

ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Columbia college values a student body filled with people from varying geographic, social, economic, and ethnic backgrounds because of the spectrum of perspectives and ideas each student will brings to a class. Therefore, Columbia’s admission selection of an applicant is based on number of quantitative and qualitative factors. Aside from good grades in high school, the admissions officers are looking for extracurricular activities, an applicant’s maturity and leadership capabilities, and his or her personal interests, or hobbies.

This past year, 15,000 applications were received; of that amount, only 1,633 were accepted (a 10.9 percent admit rate). The odds are tough, but the general rule-of-thumb is that the more intellectually passionate, the better the odds. Students with strong interest in physics, chemistry, math, and astronomy are also strongly encouraged to apply.

The comprehensive application is designed to allow students many opportunities to document their achievements, interest, and goals, the regular admission deadline is January 1, and notification of the admission office’s decision gets mailed in April.

ACADEMIC LIFE

The tie that binds Columbia’s varied student population is the college’s core curriculum, a rigorous series of required classes based on the contributions of Western civilization to the modern world. Through the core-which was developed after World War I and patterned by many other school shortly thereafter-students are exposed to the works of Homer, Plato, Beethoven, and Picasso, among other greats.

What makes the core classes a more powerful exposure to the world’s great achievements in literature, history, philosophy, art, music and science, is class size; no seminar class holds more than twenty-two students. In such an intimate setting, students are expected to engage in intellectual observation, argument, comparison, and analysis, all in preparation for the life of the worldly freethinker Columbia would like all its students to become.

The two cornerstones of the core; Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, or Lit Hum and CC as they are popularly called are year-long classes that are usually taken during the first two years at Columbia. While students may complain about the vast amount of reading they’ll do for homework, or each course’s length (two-hour classes twice a week for an entire year!), they will in the same breath wish there was more time to spend with each work.

Lit Hum is designed to take a close examination of the most influential literary texts of Western culture. The class is light on lecture and heavy on the sometimes heated discussion of a text’s themes that is expected in every class. Students soon enough find that to properly discuss a text, they must also be good listeners-listening to their instructor as well as their classmates.

CC was created in 1919 as a war-and-peace-issues course and has evolved into a class preparing students for lives as active, socially-minded citizens, indispensable members of a democratic from of government. Intense class discussions centered on the works of some of the world’s most influential political thinkers will engage students for most of their class time.

Often, teachers for both Lit Hum and CC will invoke the Socratic Method to teach a point, provoking the “disputatious learning” so favored at Columbia. Along with the exploration of literary themes and philosophy that students will do as class by sharing ideas and opinions, students on an individual basis will learn very quickly how to defend their own points of view. And defend them well, which is why it is always painfully obvious in class if a student didn’t do the reading.

The rest of the Core is composed of:

·  The art and music humanities classes, formally called Masterpieces of Western Art and Masterpieces of Western Music (one semester each)

·      Three semesters of approved science courses

·   Frontiers of Science, which introduces students to exciting ideas at the forefront of scientific research and develops the habits of mind characteristic of as scientific approach to the world.

·      Intermediate proficiency a foreign language

·      One semester of a comprehensive writing class

·      One year of physical education and a mandatory seventy-five-yarHuHHd swimming requirements

·     One year of “Major Cultures” classes, an introduction to those major civilizations not included in the core.

Both art and music humanities courses aim to produce visually and musically literate students. In Art Hum, students observe and also analyze the style and motifs of many great paintings, sculptures and monuments of the Western world, like the Greek Parthenon, Picasso’s “Guernica,” and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Class lecture is supplemented by visits to many of New York’s famed museums, galleries, and buildings.

In a similar way, Music Hum a class that chronologically follows music from its origins to the creation of symphonies, opera, and jazz is enhanced by the city’s constant rhythm and beat. Students are expected to attend at least one musical performance, (and of course there are many to choose from In the Big Apple), and write about if fro class.

SOCIAL LIFE AND ACTIVITIES

At CC, there’s a student organization or club for just about everyone-Frisbee throwers, community volunteers, jugglers, a Capella singers, debaters, and aspiring comics alike. There are also groups representing just about every ethnic and religious background, political party, and career interest. Student group plan social and fundraising events, but are also there to foster friendship and support among students who are dealing with being away from home and the things with which they identity. In all, there are over 300 organizations, which include fraternities and sororities, and student run media outlets, including a daily newspaper, radio station, and cable television channel.

Athletics

Columbia, as part of the levy league, also competes in NCAAA Division I sports. Men’s varsity teams compete in baseball, basketball, crew (both heavy and lightweight), cross country, running, fencing, football, golf, soccer, swimming, tennis, diving, wrestling, and track and field, as do women’s varsity teams in archery, basketball, crew, cross-country, diving fencing, golf field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, volleyball, and track and field.

There are also intramural opportunities in flag football, basketball, racquetball, soccer, softball, squash, swimming, tennis, Ultimate Frisbee and volleyball.

FINANCIAL AID

Columbia College invests in its students. The financial aids services office works diligently to make the CC experience affordable to anyone based on need. The entire college works from a foundation of true scholarship; this is evident in the student body. In recent years more that forty-five percent of all CC students have received financial aid.

GRADUATES

Some of the best mail you’ll ever receive after college comes in the form of Columbia College Magazine. It’s downright fascinating to see what your fellow grads are up to these days. Without a doubt, they are doing something amazing and demanding. On any give page, I can read about a fellow CISLA (Too Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts) scholar heading a development project in West Africa, or learn news of a CC couple staring school in western Massachusetts.

The advantage of going to a small school is clear in this regard-the alumni networks is booming with successful social and professional relationships. And the pool is so eclectic due to the varied interests of the diverse student body. It is not uncommon to find many double majors, too.

A key benefit of going to a small liberal arts college such as Columbia College surfaces here. Because your education at CC is so personal and individual visualized, you are able to gain the skills and make the professional contacts as an undergraduates that will put you ahead of the rest in what is becoming a more and more competitive job search. When applying to any given field-professional and academic-sure enough, you will find a CC alumnus involved in some way. With more than 20,000 alumni and nearly 600 of them living abroad, if you wanted to, say, apply for an international fellowship in Timbuktu, its guaranteed that current undergraduates or Columbia College alumni have been there-and they are willing to help too.