Wow, there are a lot of you guys posting here at SDN asking about Columbia's curriculum. So, be sure to check out the other postings, many of which ask similar questions.
To address the previous poster, it's almost always a bad idea to pick schools based on rankings alone, the validity of which is questionable. I applied to about 20 schools and was accepted to 7. Some were "ranked" above and others below, but that wasn't my most important criterion. To each his own, however, I suppose.
Anyways, first year is mostly basic sciences like it is at almost all med schools. You sit in lecture 3 hours a day from Monday through Friday 9:00 AM to 12:00 noon, then break for lunch, and come back at 1:00. Two days a week you have Anatomy, for which you have 1 additional hour of lecture and 3 hours of lab (Tuesday/Thursday), so these feel like the longest days of the week and you get out at 5:00 PM.
On one other day of the week on a non-anatomy day (Mon-Wed-Fri) you will have your clinical selective from 1:00 to 5:00. Most people shadow a physician in a field in which they are interested. How much you actually get to do depends mostly on the doc. One of my selectives was with a doc working at a methadone clinic. The other was with an academic neurologist here at Columbia specializing in neurodegenerative diseases.
So, that leaves two days per week where you basically have your afternoons completely free w/ only 3 hours of class. Pretty sweet.
Clinical Practice I, the course you referred to, is held on Fridays. This is known as "the touchy feely course" and isn't taken as seriously by most students as it probably should be. You learn about things like: how to talk with patients; patient concerns; behavioral science stuff; biostatistics; etc. We usually have an hour or two of lecture (depending on the day) and then an hour of small group, where you discuss issues brought up in lecture. You also role play different case scenarios and practice interviewing actor-patients, which can be fun or stressful, depending on the actor and script.
One course which is semi-unique to Columbia (at least in terms of time commitment, since it runs for months on end) is Neuroscience. You basically run through most of the chapters in Kandel's (2000 Nobel laureate) Neuro book. Kandel, who is 70+, is a very thoughtful, logical lecturer and still gives some of the lectures, although most of them are handled by other specialists.
