Today was the day that we took a train to visit Columbia University in New York City. It is a three hour train ride. That has to be the longest train ride of my life. It wasn’t bad the first hour but then I was running out of things to do. Once we arrived, it was hot and humid and it didn’t smell too good. If that is how New York is, I’d rather not live there.
Next was to experience the New York Subway and surprising enough, it wasn’t bad. It was just the tunnel and all the people running all over the place.
The next event was to go to Staten Island on a ferry. It was really fun and we even saw the Statue of Liberty.
After that was the main event, the tour and information session at Columbia. During the information session, the speaker was very organized and had a lot of knowledge about the University. He knew what he was talking about. He talked about the history and what Columbia a small undergraduate institute. Then he went on about how housing is guaranteed and that there are lots of people and how they were primarily engineering and liberal arts. Then was the tour of the housing. It was fun to see how the dorms all have their names and they all have a meaning. They even had a library with over 9 million books!
The only thing is, I can’t see myself attending Columbia. I guess this was a kind of hit and miss for me. I didn’t really like the divided campus, and the majors didn’t make me interested. The campus was just a little too close to close to New York City. I know it’s a good city; it’s just not for me. It was worth it though to cross something off the list of possible and we even got to see Time Square, but I can’t live there.
Andrew,
ReplyDeleteIf you had relied solely on pamphlets and the Internet, would you have the same feeling about Columbia as you did after paying a visit? That's the value of these site visits. You just can't tell enough about a school without a personal visit.
The school web sites are never going to tell you that it's hot and muggy; they're never going to show you photos of the homeless people around campus and you'll never be able to appreciate those smells you were writing about.
Not every school is right for every applicant. I'm glad you're seeing that first hand.