2010-2011 Columbia Application Thread

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Sherlock87 said:
Hi mmmcdowe,

Would you or any other current student here please post some information about the curriculum? I understand that it is true pass/fail and systems-based. However, I'm curious about how much lecture time and PBL there is. What's a typical day's schedule like? How many hours of lecture, PBL, and other small group activities do you have on an average day?

Thanks
Click to expand...

You should expand and read all of the links on the left side of this page: http://ps.columbia.edu/education
There are descriptions and even class calendars that show the length/frequency of classes.

Also consider this quote (mmmcdowe, do you have any input on this kind of stuff?):

MikeS 78 said:
I am currently in my 4th year of medical school. I am here to say that most of what people allow to weigh in on their decision to attend medical school is pretty irrelevant. I base this statement on 1) what I took into consideration 2) what other people I met on the trail into consideration 3) talking to prospective applicants 4) discussions with fellow classmates. This is in large part because most information about schools comes from is from first year students, who really have no idea of what the school is like, sales angles of schools attempting to reel in students etc, and random discussions from people who don't know much more than you do.

What is not important:

1) Impression of students: this is bogus, totally bogus. Every school has a fairly similar mix of a few types and if you think you can tell what students are like by meeting the tour guide and 3 other people you are fooling yourself.

A) Gunners- Every american medical school has gunners. Furthermore, your interview process will not allow you to prove or disprove my theory, as these people generally aren't doing interviews. Also don't let anyone tell you that theres no competition at their school because there is always someone who wants to do ortho at the hosp for special surgery, even at DO schools.

Moreover if you are really worried about dodging the "Gunners" then 90% chance that you are one....my observational experience

B) Slackers- These are the real people I'd be worried about: they tend not to show up to stuff and make everyone look bad.

C) Superstars- Every school has these, good schools have a few more.

D) Everyone else (prob 45-60% of a class)

2) Curriculum- Guys I hear this alot and read this on this board alot....looking back I thought this was a big deal, now I say "who really cares." Here's my breakdown of the issue

A) PBL- you have no background to base your case based learning on...and will not have it until year 2 and probably 1/2 through that (when you start organ system pathology/pathophys). Really how can you expect someone to understand CHF related fluid retention with no prior knowledge of renin-angiotensin and the kidneys...silly

B) lectures vs no lectures- For all practical purposes, you are going to teach your damn selves 90% of the first 2 years.
The reason for this is that most of the first two years really is vocab and getting your mind around a few key concepts so that third year you can actually understand what your residents and attendings are saying. So despite all the hype about new novel ways of learning it boils down to you hanging out with Robbins pathology, a microscope/online slides and a cadaver and figuring it out.

As far as clinical relevant knowledge year 1-2 is more or less the about the same, deal with it. I say this coming from an Ivy so trust me.

3) Quality of facilities- Theres three reasons why this is pretty irrelevant
A) they never show you all the facilities-

B) Does learning in an old building really impact your education

C) When you're trudging in the snow at 4 am to rounds on surgery are you really going to notice or care what the outside of the hospital looks like......highly doubtful

4) extracurricular/social stuff- This is +/-. If you have a passion for playing the violin...can't live without it and are willing to do it despite significant other time committments..this can be a plus

however, do not get the false impression that a medical school class remains this cohesive bunch of social butterflies for 4 years. Generally, everyone is very busy and alot of people are overwhelmed. The attendance at class events dropped preciptiously year 2.

5) early patient contact- I think this is a total sales pitch: To provide an anecdote: It was january of my second year. we were in our physical diagnosis class, having our first group interview with a patient with renal failure and volume overload causing CHF.

so the encounter goes like this.....

A classmate "so what brings you to the hospital today"
patient: "I am having a tough time breathing, it feels like im drowning when I lie flat"
Classmate "that sounds bad"

long silence.

This classmate was a smart guy and ended up being AOA and this was 1 1/2 years into medical school.....

so if thats 2nd year what are you really going to do interviewing patients 1st year.......basically acquire bad habits that you will need to fix later in life. Is it a total waste? no. However do not make this any more than a minor consideration.


Things that are important

1) What is the 3rd year like and how is it structured?:

I almost never hear any real questions or comment from applicants regarding this topic. In the end this is the only real difference between schools, and probably could be the only real question to ask? more specific questions?

a) How are the rotations structured? What is your role on the wards? Do you have a clear role Do you get your "hands dirty" alot, or is it alot of shadowing? This is very important. You really don't learn much by watching people do stuff and if they work you down to a minimal role you will not gain much experience and will suck for several months into internship.

Now I'm not saying you demand the right to cross clamp the aorta during a CABG, but medicine is not a spectator sport and if the school doesn't have a culture of teaching (i.e. alot of patients are private patients, medical students aren't allowed to do anything) it will be a long, boring 3rd year.


2) Where do 3rd year evaluations come from?

Alot of people go in with this attitude "I am here to learn not to get grades." I agree with this attitude 85%. However, using that attitude indiscriminantly is impractical and can lead to some evaulations that you are not too happy with, it happens

You probably can't please everyone equally. This is especially true on surgery and medicine where there is not enough hours in the day.

Thus, the recommendation I make to everyone is to figure out roughly who writes the evaluation and what they expect and make sure you do a really good job on that. I do not recommend kissing up....However, it is really easy at times to get caught up in "which 5 minute presentation do I spend preparing for tomorrow. " This is why if you know who is grading you you can prioritize which person you pull the NEJM articles out for, and who gets the 15 minute before cram session off up-to-date.

Understand however while this happens at all schools (its how the beast works) not all schools do a reasonable job at making this fair or letting you know who is grading you or what you are supposed to do. Thus you should really make an effort to ask questions such as for every rotation do you have an attending directly responsible for evaluating you, or a preceptor (someone not taking care of patients that you are caring for who evaluates your academic abilities and analytic abilities? ideally your grade should come roughly equally from both.

3) Where do the students end up? If you dont want to do primary care, and 75% of school X does. Guess what, you are signing up for 15 weeks of primary care rotations at that school. Conversely, if you want to do general internal medicine or family medicine....and you come to a school that puts out 25 orthopods and 10 neurosurgeons a year.....you will spend alot of time learning about surgeries that you will never perform in your life.


4) How are medical students protected from scut?

If they cannot give you a real answer to this question expect to learn alot about running bloods to the lab and wheeling patients to the CT scanner and very little about managing an MI.

Some schools do a good job of setting up systems to prevent this, however I have also met interns who told me that they failed the surgery shelf because their school was rampant with scut and they didn't learn anything. I think my school did a very good job at scut control, however I have wheeled my share of patients to CT at 2 am.

5) How receptive is the administation to fixing problems and/or disciplining out of line behavior, espcially from residents?

trust me when you have an ID class where the course director is terrible, you will really appreciate it when a new course director is hired the next year.

6) how is the research opportunities at this school?

If you want to end up at an academic program, there will come a time when you will seek papers and if they are not there to be written then you will understand the meaning of this question. If not then forget I mentioned this.

7) how good is this school at focusing on the bread and butter?

This is especially relevant if you are looking at an academic powerhouse type place. Typically alot of times you will find that big tertiary centers tend to be filled with people who A) study esoteric diseases, B) specialize in highly uncommon or speciallized surgeries or diagnostic tests, or C) only doing big commando surgeries on cases people in the community looked at and said no way im touching that.

This is something you may be interested in as an attending or at the end of your residency. However in medical school most of these areas will not be your field and learning the literature on steroid tapers for patients with the CREST syndrome, the signs and symptoms of spinocerebellar ataxia 8 or how to resect a pseudomyxoma peritonei is probably not the best use of time in your only exposure to the area. Its easy to get caught up in that stuff, however good schools recognize the nature of the academic beast and try to make sure that you leave knowing the stages of active labor, how to read an EKG and how to manage childhood asthma.

I hope this helps
mike
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1) Impression of students:

I agree that you can't get a full view of the student body, but ultimately you have to make your impression some how, and unless you go to second look this ultimately should play a factor for better or worse. Further, a lot of schools go out of their way to try to get as many students to come into the interview room as possible, they can't all be rapidly enthusiastic like me...


A) Gunners-

Once again, I agree that all schools are going to have hypercompetitive people that may have poor social tendencies (not many though, there is too much cooperation built into medicine now adays). Where you go, however, can play a significant effect on how much this affects you. Schools with de-emphasized grading systems like our own really take a lot of the bite out of those people. Further, they tend to mellow by the time you get to clinics. At the very least the rest of the students will have marked them by then.Ultimately, everyone would rather honor than not, and everyone w orks hard. Most people just realize that their performance is really not based on that of their peers. At Columbia, clinical grades are basically set that you begin at high pass and you can either go up or down. You can honor by doing really well on the self exams, really well in your patient care/presentations to the attendings, or really well in your write ups/preceptor groups. Only one of those three has anything to do with your group mates.

B) Slackers-

Meh, I don't really see how that affects you, nor are there really that many of them.

C) Superstars-

Agreed, some people are just freaking brilliant.

2) Curriculum-

A) PBL- you have no background to base your case based learning on...and will not have it until year 2 and probably 1/2 through that (when you start organ system pathology/pathophys). Really how can you expect someone to understand CHF related fluid retention with no prior knowledge of renin-angiotensin and the kidneys...silly

I like having "applied PBL" here at Columbia. You learn it and then you apply it to a case with a team. It works well, and it is nonmandatory, except for 2-3 quizzes per month, which let me pick what I liked and discard what I didn't.

B) lectures vs no lectures-

Agree that medicine is primarily self study, both the first two and last two years. I think some ways of learning the material make more sense than others, but once again I agree that mostly you learn it by yourself or with a study buddy. Disagree on the purpose of the years though. A firm understanding of pathophys makes life a lot easier.


3) Quality of facilities- Theres three reasons why this is pretty irrelevant

I agree that asthetics don't matter, though you do want a nice place to relax somewhere on campus, but should be interested in knowing where you will be able to study, where the coffee/food is, if the campus has wifi, if their are power outlets in lecture halls, etc. Having access to computers widely throughout campus is also nice. Schools definitely show you the nice stuff as much as possible, so walk around on your own.

4) extracurricular/social stuff-

Attendance is reasonable at Columbia, probably because so many folk live near/on campus. Socialization decreases in the major clinical year, but we still have monthly get togethers.

5) early patient contact-

Disagree and agree. Definitely it is a buzz phrase, but you can have valuable patient contact early on. Learning the basics of interviewing and physical exam and how one presents to an attending is valuable and keeps you engaged with the material. Interviewing a patient with endocarditis while studying cardiology IS valuable, just because you aren't a master and ask a few dumb questions doesn't mean it isn't.Better to ask them then than on the wards.


Things that are important

1) What is the 3rd year like and how is it structured?:

Definitely clinicals are undervalued, mostly because it is hard to know what to ask as a pre-med.
a) How are the rotations structured?

Very important, and I feel that this is one of columbia's strongest points. Private patients have their own floor and don't count toward's your team's quota, meaning there are always patients available for you to learn from. Enormous culture of teaching, partially fueled by the large number of alumni that work in columbia affiliate hospitals. Residents definitely expect you to fill them in on the goings on of your patient and you make a difference. I caught a person going into a major depressive episode and alerted my resident that she wasn't getting her meds.

2) Where do 3rd year evaluations come from?

See above for columbia grading

3) Where do the students end up?

Agree that you should know what the breakdown is in terms of your curriculum during 3rd year. Columbia's tendency to pop out surgical subspecialists is definitely due to the fact that you are required to rotate 1-2 weeks in each of them. Tons of kids tell me that they never knew they would go into specialty x until they did a rotation during 3rd year here. I wouldn't read too much into match lists.

4) How are medical students protected from scut?

We are very protected from scut. There is an anonymous reporting system in place, and I know one student in my class got switched one day after he started into another group because of the fact that his resident wasn't doing his job. As a whole the staff and attendings feel very strongly about not wasting your time with scut, but realize that the definition of scut DOES NOT apply to your patients. If the intern isn't above drawing bloods when needed for his/her patients (like when the nurse can't get the vein) then why shouldn't you do it for your patients?

5) How receptive is the administation to fixing problems and/or disciplining out of line behavior, espcially from residents?

Agreed, Columbia replaced our anatomy professor, changed several lecturers, and fired several residents last year based on student feedback.

6) how is the research opportunities at this school?

We are a doris duke member and have more doris duke students here this year than any other institution, even the CDC (which we top by I believe 5). Research is here, but it is NEVER required.

7) how good is this school at focusing on the bread and butter?

I think New York Presby's greatest strength is the volume and diversity of patients that we see here. You get your bread and butter but you get to see some things that you may never see again. You never know however, and should get as broad of a spectrum as possible. My father works in a rural ER and saw a case of a disease with less than 100 recorded patients living. He had seen one 30 years ago in medical school and was the only one able to identify what it was. The value of being at a big hospital is that you can get the uber specialists, but you also have access to so much of everything that you don't have to worry about never seeing the bread and butter. Further, you are supplemented daily with a few hours of tutorials and lectures depending on the rotation (in medicine, which I am doing, we have weekly radiology conferences as well as EKG sessions, lab value tutorials, daily case reports, etc.
 
Sherlock87 said:
Hi mmmcdowe,

Would you or any other current student here please post some information about the curriculum? I understand that it is true pass/fail and systems-based. However, I'm curious about how much lecture time and PBL there is. What's a typical day's schedule like? How many hours of lecture, PBL, and other small group activities do you have on an average day?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Here is an excerpt from something that I will post once interviews are all over:

As far as the pre-clinical curriculum goes, we have a three semester curriculum instead of four. Most days are from about 9-12 or 9-1, with one to three afternoons a week with afternoon classes for about 4 hours depending on the part of curriculum you are in. The first semester consists of 3 major courses: Molecular Mechanisms, which is an umbrella course for essentially all basic medical sciences, Anatomy, and Foundations of Clinical medicine. FCM is on Wednesday mornings instead of MM and is a combination of bioethics and clinical skills. For example, you may have a lecture on how one appropriately ascertains a patient’s sexual history and then move on to small groups to discuss and practice this interview with a standardized patient (which is an actor). You then will move onto real patient interviews at an afternoon clerkship on either Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. In the clerkship, you are paired with a health care practitioner at a wide variety of sites (such as The Door, Calvary Hospital, Young Mens Clinic, Neurosurgeons, Physical Therapists, offer examples as needed, preferably your own experiences) and get to interview patients in a very diverse array of situations. You do two clerkships in the first semester, and you do have some say in selection when possible. After the first semester you switch over from history taking to physical examinations in the second semester and then finally to how one efficiently conveys information from histories and physicals to an attending during presentations and in the form of write ups.

Anatomy consists of basically two full afternoons, one in the dissection lab and the other in small groups. Small groups consist of four students per cadaver, with 2 groups dissecting the same cadaver on alternative days. Now some of you may be thinking “ah man I want to dissect the whole cadaver myself”, but I promise by the second day you will be thinking “I’m so glad it isn’t my turn to dissect today.” Don’t get me wrong, I love to dissect, I still go in on occasion and do so. HOWEVER, dissection itself has a very low benefit to cost ratio and consists mostly of cleaning up things so that you can actually decide what everything is. The reason why we only dissect half is to save everyone time, you still get to see and learn everything. Now, the non-dissecting group consists of osteology- the study of bones-, radiology, and applied clinical skills. For example, guy walks in with knife in arm, what nerve was cut, what finger can’t he move? This is great practice because both our exams and the step 1 test anatomy in this format.

.Now for some general things about our courses. All classes are recorded, and what is especially nice is the slides are synched to the lectures. So if you fell asleep during slide 33 you can click it and just watch that part of the lectures. This makes it a great study and review tool as well. In addition, we are a pass fail unranked school during the pre-clinical years. The unranked part is the most important part, as a lot of schools say they are pass fail but have an internal system of rankings. Unless everyone who passes is ranked first, then clearly they used grades to determine your grades. Our system is not about slacking off and just breezing by, everyone works hard and the average grades have not changed since before the system was instituted. What it does is take as much of the anxiety out of medical education as possible and gives you the confidence to take advantage of the free time that is naturally built into the pre-clinical curriculum. So you can do volunteering, do fun things, do research, do shadowing, or just figure out what you want to do with yourself after medical school without a nagging voice in the back of your head eating away at you because you are terrified of getting a 99 and not a 100. Pre-clinical grades and rankings are ultimately not highly valued by residency directors, so you aren’t losing out on anything when compared to the confidence to build your resume in other ways. Another nice thing is that we take our anatomy practical exams in the groups that we dissected in. So, once again, everyone still works hard and learns everything, but it takes the stress out of the experience and gives you valuable experience on how to work on a problem in groups like you will on the words. We also have great professors leading our courses that really care. Dr. Barasch, the MM director, has in the past re-recorded lectures for us and spent the night before the first exam in a sleeping bag in his office so that we could come and ask him questions all night. .
 
Wow! I wasn't expecting nearly so detailed of a response. Thank you so much!
 
mmmcdowe said:
Here is an excerpt from something that I will post once interviews are all over:

As far as the pre-clinical curriculum goes, we have a three semester curriculum instead of four. Most days are from about 9-12 or 9-1, with one to three afternoons a week with afternoon classes for about 4 hours depending on the part of curriculum you are in. The first semester consists of 3 major courses: Molecular Mechanisms, which is an umbrella course for essentially all basic medical sciences, Anatomy, and Foundations of Clinical medicine. FCM is on Wednesday mornings instead of MM and is a combination of bioethics and clinical skills. For example, you may have a lecture on how one appropriately ascertains a patient’s sexual history and then move on to small groups to discuss and practice this interview with a standardized patient (which is an actor). You then will move onto real patient interviews at an afternoon clerkship on either Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. In the clerkship, you are paired with a health care practitioner at a wide variety of sites (such as The Door, Calvary Hospital, Young Mens Clinic, Neurosurgeons, Physical Therapists, offer examples as needed, preferably your own experiences) and get to interview patients in a very diverse array of situations. You do two clerkships in the first semester, and you do have some say in selection when possible. After the first semester you switch over from history taking to physical examinations in the second semester and then finally to how one efficiently conveys information from histories and physicals to an attending during presentations and in the form of write ups.

Anatomy consists of basically two full afternoons, one in the dissection lab and the other in small groups. Small groups consist of four students per cadaver, with 2 groups dissecting the same cadaver on alternative days. Now some of you may be thinking “ah man I want to dissect the whole cadaver myself”, but I promise by the second day you will be thinking “I’m so glad it isn’t my turn to dissect today.” Don’t get me wrong, I love to dissect, I still go in on occasion and do so. HOWEVER, dissection itself has a very low benefit to cost ratio and consists mostly of cleaning up things so that you can actually decide what everything is. The reason why we only dissect half is to save everyone time, you still get to see and learn everything. Now, the non-dissecting group consists of osteology- the study of bones-, radiology, and applied clinical skills. For example, guy walks in with knife in arm, what nerve was cut, what finger can’t he move? This is great practice because both our exams and the step 1 test anatomy in this format.

.Now for some general things about our courses. All classes are recorded, and what is especially nice is the slides are synched to the lectures. So if you fell asleep during slide 33 you can click it and just watch that part of the lectures. This makes it a great study and review tool as well. In addition, we are a pass fail unranked school during the pre-clinical years. The unranked part is the most important part, as a lot of schools say they are pass fail but have an internal system of rankings. Unless everyone who passes is ranked first, then clearly they used grades to determine your grades. Our system is not about slacking off and just breezing by, everyone works hard and the average grades have not changed since before the system was instituted. What it does is take as much of the anxiety out of medical education as possible and gives you the confidence to take advantage of the free time that is naturally built into the pre-clinical curriculum. So you can do volunteering, do fun things, do research, do shadowing, or just figure out what you want to do with yourself after medical school without a nagging voice in the back of your head eating away at you because you are terrified of getting a 99 and not a 100. Pre-clinical grades and rankings are ultimately not highly valued by residency directors, so you aren’t losing out on anything when compared to the confidence to build your resume in other ways. Another nice thing is that we take our anatomy practical exams in the groups that we dissected in. So, once again, everyone still works hard and learns everything, but it takes the stress out of the experience and gives you valuable experience on how to work on a problem in groups like you will on the words. We also have great professors leading our courses that really care. Dr. Barasch, the MM director, has in the past re-recorded lectures for us and spent the night before the first exam in a sleeping bag in his office so that we could come and ask him questions all night. .
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You are awesome. That is all. 🙂
 
My understanding was that Columbia is on a non-rolling basis in terms of admissions decisions. But I can't jive that with this statement from the admissions website:

"It is in your best interest to do all you can to facilitate the prompt completion of your application. After December, the later your application, the fewer places remain in the class. At later stages, highly ranked applicants have a greater chance of being offered a place on our waitlist instead of being given an immediate offer of admission."

It doesn't seem that they're talking about offering interview spots and December is the application deadline anyway. Can someone please clarify how the application date matters in the final decisions that go out in March? Or have some acceptances gone out already?
 
baysouth said:
My understanding was that Columbia is on a non-rolling basis in terms of admissions decisions. But I can't jive that with this statement from the admissions website:

"It is in your best interest to do all you can to facilitate the prompt completion of your application. After December, the later your application, the fewer places remain in the class. At later stages, highly ranked applicants have a greater chance of being offered a place on our waitlist instead of being given an immediate offer of admission."

It doesn't seem that they're talking about offering interview spots and December is the application deadline anyway. Can someone please clarify how the application date matters in the final decisions that go out in March? Or have some acceptances gone out already?
Click to expand...

Don't overanalyze this statement. It's poorly phrased and I can say with utmost certainty (I'm a P&S student) that admissions decisions are non rolling independent of completion date.
 
smartalleck2 said:
Don't overanalyze this statement. It's poorly phrased and I can say with utmost certainty (I'm a P&S student) that admissions decisions are non rolling independent of completion date.
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Thanks, I was under the same impression. Did Columbia used to be rolling and maybe this is an unchanged, leftover statement on the website from before? Otherwise, just reading the statement, without any risk of overanalysis, it seems pretty straightforward that they give applicants with sooner completion dates preference (by definition a rolling process).
 
baysouth said:
Thanks, I was under the same impression. Did Columbia used to be rolling and maybe this is an unchanged, leftover statement on the website from before? Otherwise, just reading the statement, without any risk of overanalysis, it seems pretty straightforward that they give applicants with sooner completion dates preference (by definition a rolling process).
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Yes the statement explicitly says so. However, it is false and you're probably right in inferring that it's a vestige of previous application cycles.
 
baysouth said:
My understanding was that Columbia is on a non-rolling basis in terms of admissions decisions. But I can't jive that with this statement from the admissions website:

"It is in your best interest to do all you can to facilitate the prompt completion of your application. After December, the later your application, the fewer places remain in the class. At later stages, highly ranked applicants have a greater chance of being offered a place on our waitlist instead of being given an immediate offer of admission."

It doesn't seem that they're talking about offering interview spots and December is the application deadline anyway. Can someone please clarify how the application date matters in the final decisions that go out in March? Or have some acceptances gone out already?
Click to expand...

Even though they're non-rolling, time of application matters. Think about it, if you only have 1000 interviews slots and 1000 really awesome people apply in the first three months, why would you keep pushing those people back in favor of the unknown, less punctual people? And I'm not just hypothesizing, I talked to my interviewer about this and she told me they had ~600 applications on the last day (Nov 15 or whatever) that they couldn't even look at last year because they had no more interviews to offer.
 
smartalleck2 said:
Yes the statement explicitly says so. However, it is false and you're probably right in inferring that it's a vestige of previous application cycles.
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Yes. Feel free to email them about it, maybe they will fix it finally...
 
since the month is more than half over, can we pretty much assume interview invites are finished?

thanks!
 
At my interview, it was mentioned that this weeks is the last week of interviews.
 
we hear back march 15th, right?
or they send a letter march 15th?
whats the deal haha
 
agreed! it really sucks that our spring break falls on the week when we'll be hearing from columbia. especially since the letters come to the preferred addresses instead of to my home.
 
I think I'm going tO have to not read SDN for the entire month of March. It makes me anxious just to read last year's thread around this time.
 
nerdtastic said:
agreed! it really sucks that our spring break falls on the week when we'll be hearing from columbia. especially since the letters come to the preferred addresses instead of to my home.
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I called the office once b/c I saw that I was missing the Apt # on the preferred address on my secondary, and they said that they mail stuff out to the address listed on you AMCAS primary app. She might have misunderstood me/I was confused about what she said, but bottom line, don't bank on it coming to your preferred. maybe mmmcdowe could verify?
 
anyone know if its too late to change my address on amcas?

i mean im sure i still can, but will the letter still go to the address listed now?
 
etherpentane said:
I called the office once b/c I saw that I was missing the Apt # on the preferred address on my secondary, and they said that they mail stuff out to the address listed on you AMCAS primary app. She might have misunderstood me/I was confused about what she said, but bottom line, don't bank on it coming to your preferred. maybe mmmcdowe could verify?
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It came to my preferred not permanent address when I applied, but that was 2 cycles ago.
 
ColeOnTheRoll said:
Never been to Durham, but I can't really see how it could compete with NYC.
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they got the Q, yo

last year there was a movement for mmmmmmmcdowe to camp out in front of the admissions office and blog live around march 1, i want to revive this movement.
 
so I didn't love Columbia when I interviewed there but after reading everything mmmcdowe has to say, I'm sort of dying for an acceptance so I can do a revisit. Curse you, mmmcdowe! I would have been so happy not even worrying about Columbia if it weren't for you!
 
rhesuspieces said:
so I didn't love Columbia when I interviewed there but after reading everything mmmcdowe has to say, I'm sort of dying for an acceptance so I can do a revisit. Curse you, mmmcdowe! I would have been so happy not even worrying about Columbia if it weren't for you!
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Question for mmmcdowe,

I have some friends who attend Columbia undergrad and they hate it. Personally, I don't like Columbia UG because of the curriculum and because I feel the political activism of the student body is way overboard sometimes. I know med school and grad school should be a different story- (campuses are about 50 blocks apart) -

Any comments? Or do Columbia med students also feel the need to stage a demonstration and then a counter demonstration while deciding to change a lightbulb? 😉
 
BrainBuff said:
Question for mmmcdowe,

I have some friends who attend Columbia undergrad and they hate it. Personally, I don't like Columbia UG because of the curriculum and because I feel the political activism of the student body is way overboard sometimes. I know med school and grad school should be a different story- (campuses are about 50 blocks apart) -

Any comments? Or do Columbia med students also feel the need to stage a demonstration and then a counter demonstration while deciding to change a lightbulb? 😉
Click to expand...

I personally haven't ever gotten that feeling from the undergrad, but my experience is pretty limited to the one free class I took down there about medical history and the time I spend at their library (which is next to the hospital I am at right now). The more vocal groups are definitely astoundingly liberal, for sure. For the most part they just seem like normal college kids to me. Smarter on average, I suppose, but I hear the same topics that I always have heard college age kids talk about (meaning much more about relationships and classroom woes than about foucault and nietzsche) Anyways, there's really only as much or little interaction with the undergrads as you wish. We do have interschool mixers, but it is for the graduate programs only. There are people very involved in political subjects here at the medical school (international and underserved rights especially), but no one holds protests or pickets Bard hall.
 
I can't stop reading the threads from cycles in previous years!
The wait is excruciatingly painful
 
So this was essentially the last day of interviews folks. There is one more tomorrow for mostly post-bach applicants I believe, and often there is a last minute interviewee here and there. Best of luck to everyone in the remainder of this cycle 🙂
 
do you think they'll be sending things out on monday, even though its still february, or that they'll wait until tuesday?
 
mmmcdowe said:
So this was essentially the last day of interviews folks. There is one more tomorrow for mostly post-bach applicants I believe, and often there is a last minute interviewee here and there. Best of luck to everyone in the remainder of this cycle 🙂
Click to expand...

Do they start making decisions after the final interview, or have they started already?

Also, I'm curious how non-rolling decisions are made. Do they go through file by file, giving a yay or nay to each as they go (and isn't this basically like rolling)? Anyone have any idea?
 
mmmcdowe said:
So this was essentially the last day of interviews folks. There is one more tomorrow for mostly post-bach applicants I believe, and often there is a last minute interviewee here and there. Best of luck to everyone in the remainder of this cycle 🙂
Click to expand...

So many interviewees! I feel like the chances of getting into Columbia are terrible. They interview 50% more than Yale and 100% more than Emory. It's insanity.
 
neuroe said:
so many interviewees! I feel like the chances of getting into columbia are terrible. They interview 50% more than yale and 100% more than emory. It's insanity.
Click to expand...

this is madness.
This is colubmiaaaa!
 
MrAppleseed said:
Do they start making decisions after the final interview, or have they started already?

Also, I'm curious how non-rolling decisions are made. Do they go through file by file, giving a yay or nay to each as they go (and isn't this basically like rolling)? Anyone have any idea?
Click to expand...

I assume that given the magnitude they have been whittling the list down for some time. I know that dr Nicholas looks at all applicants but I stay out of the process and so I don't really know the specifics. They meet as a group for part of it.

It is different from rolling because they can 'yay' more applications than they have spots for and then go through those and pick the final list. So it doesn't matter whenyour application is read.

Also, people will inevitably try to analyze waitlist letters. There are several separate form letters sent out. People from all letter types get accepted and rejected year after year.
 
just received columbia's md/phd decision letter (great news), for what its worth.
 
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