It's really hard for me to chose just one favorite course from my first year at Columbia, because I've loved almost every course I've taken so far (with maybe only two exceptions, aka University Writing and Frontiers of Science, which I thought were a little too reminiscent of high school). I loved Lit Hum (short for Literature Humanities), which is the...

I chose to apply to Columbia ED (Early Decision), meaning that if I was accepted, I'd be obligated to enroll there. I decided to do this because--after my first visit to the Columbia campus two months before the ED deadline--I realized that I wanted to go there more than anywhere else. At the beginning of that summer, though, this definitely wasn't the case for me, and I was still pretty undecided about where I wanted to go. To be honest, the reasons I first began to consider applying to Columbia had a lot to do with location (which I think...

I chose schools to apply to based mainly on their academic reputation, especially when it came to fields I wanted to major in or take a lot of classes in (in my case, history, writing, literature, and philosophy). After Columbia (which I was attracted to because of the Core Curriculum--I elaborate more about...

I didn't interview with Columbia, because they didn't offer on-campus interviews and only provide interviews to students who live in areas where there are enough alumni willing to be interviewers (which wasn't the case for me). However, that didn't really matter too much, since Columbia doesn't place very much (if any) emphasis on interviews as a factor for admissions, and it's mainly just a good way to talk to alumni about the school. That being said, I did interview with three schools: Yale, UChicago, and Barnard (which is basically a woman's college affiliated with Columbia). My UChicago interview definitely went...

If you end up deciding that Columbia is your top choice, I'd strongly recommend applying ED. It's hard to determine exactly how much of an advantage this gives you in the admissions process (the acceptance rate for ED applicants is usually noticeably higher than for RD applicants--though of course correlation doesn't equal causation, and it could also be the case that the types of people who apply ED to Columbia just tend to...

Overall, I'm much less involved in extracurriculars in college compared to high school. This is in part because I took on an above-average workload for Columbia College students both semesters of my first year (six courses, around the previous credit cap of 22 points) and as a result I spent most of my time focused on schoolwork. That being said, I was able to devote a decent amount of time (at least my first semester) to two extracurricular activities in college: Columbia's...

couldn't be happier with Columbia's location--it's right in Manhattan, and it has a perfect combination of a really nice (though fairly compact) campus and a very urban environment. Some people think that Morningside Heights is a relatively boring part of NYC, but personally it's one of my favorite neighborhoods in the city. The restaurants in Morningside are generally way cheaper than anywhere else I've been to in the city, and there's also a nice park (called Riverside) located just a few minutes' walk away. It's also very easy...

I think that one of the biggest pitfalls in writing a "why us" essay for Columbia is to just write about how you want to go to Columbia because it's in NYC. Of course that's one of the really awesome things about Columbia, and one of the aspects that differentiate it from the other Ivy League schools, but it doesn't really tell your reader why you want to go to Columbia specifically. After all, there are tons of universities in NYC, and if your "why us" essay could also serve equally well as an explanation of why you want to...