School HoppingOver the past two weekends, I visited four schools: Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and NYU. What follows is a random list of thoughts and experiences I had in my travels:- I really liked Columbia. Its campus is so small! I bumped into Jisoo Han (region and all-state band), Ben Leiwant (WP), and Hannah Cui (GSET)! Classes are all within a five to ten minute walk. Everyone seems to walk through the central plaza/courtyard between Low Memorial Library and Butler Library, and as several Columbia students said, "You're surrounded by familiar strangers," meaning you recognize a lot of faces from seeing people so often even if you don't know them personally. I liked a few perks Columbia students get, including:
- 100 free pages of printing per week (At Yale, I have to go to the CS building to get free printing.)
- Free dorm phone! (I think we have dorm phone lines at Yale, too, but they definitely don't supply us phones, so I doubt very many people use it.)
- However, there were a few things I disliked about Columbia, including:
- Having to be signed in by someone to get into a building (This was also the case at Johns Hopkins and NYU). I suppose it's more secure, but it's tedious. I think it's easier just to use RFID tag readers to control access to buildings and then have security guards patroling campus/buildings.
- Though I wrote about how great the Core Curriculum is in my application essay, I'm really glad I don't have to deal with it. Though I enjoy reading and discussing things like Masterpieces of Western Philosophy and Literature, it kills me when I have to write papers about this stuff.
- At Columbia, I ended up calling Stephanie Ng, a girl I knew from Governor's School of Engineering and Technology (GSET). Will looked up her dorm phone number for me in the Columbia directory. See, before Columbia, I had been at Princeton and Cornell, and at both of those places, there are SO many GSETtlers, but I never got around to meeting up with any of them because I thought it would be big awkward after not seeing them for over two years. But my experience at Columbia, where I met up with Stephanie Ng and Elaine Wang and actually bumped into Hannah Cui by the (dysfunctional?) giant sundial in the middle of campus, showed me otherwise. Despite not seeing each other for over two years, we still remembered each other and our conversations were not awkward at all. Now I regret not meeting up with the many GSET students at Cornell and Princeton when I visited those schools.
- Memorable quotes:
- "There is no campus." - Mike Mayans, in response to my comment, "Wow, NYU's campus is really spread out." I guess he's right. Just looking at a campus map, you see that the dorms are scattered all across downtown NYC. Just random buildings here and there.
- "GSET is teaching you how to network." - Hannah Cui, quoting her dad from the first GSET '07 reunion. I never thought about it that way before, but the way we could just meet up and catch up after not talking to one another for a couple of years, I guess it's because we were all familiar with one another from the GSET network.
- I never realized Cornell's campus is kinda up on a hill, but I fully appreciated this fact as I climbed up hill after hill to get from the Ithaca bus station to Cornell's campus. Also, Cornell's campus is freakin' humongous. Too big for me, I think.
- On my way back to NYC from Ithaca, I slept most of the bus ride with my sweater hood on. When I got off, my hair was sticking up pretty badly, but I was too excited to go to Columbia and too lazy to go to a bathroom to use some water to flatten my hair. So instead, I just tried to comb my hair with my hands, but some parts of my hair still stubbornly stayed up. What eventually happened was as I kept walking, I started to sweat, and I was able to use my sweat to style my hair.
- Why are there so many smokers? Much of my time walking around NYC was spent holding my breath or analyzing the wind direction to avoid smoke being blown into my face or hurrying past smokers. I can't believe one in five people in the U.S. smoke. Though I know the percentage of smokers has been consistently decreasing over the past few decades, in recent years, the rate of decrease has slowed and I think we've hit something like a lower bound.
- IT WAS SO GOOD TO JUST WALK AROUND AND VISIT PEOPLE AND NOT WORRY ABOUT TIME AND NOT DO ANY WORK AND JUST BE LAZY.
Ahhh...Thanksgiving break. |