It does seem that people at other schools think Columbia is extremely corporate. I’m not sure why that is, but it didn’t seem to match the impression I got from my visit (for what that’s worth).

I didn’t really hear much at all about students’ workloads being exceptionally high or low. One student said that the number of out-of-class activities is overwhelming and another said that school itself doesn’t take up a lot of time, but everyone else said that it is a lot of work, but extracurriculars are doable with good time management. Weird.

I also heard a lot of anti-Columbia sentiment. My impression of Columbia was that it’s more laid-back than Harvard, but students from other schools (Harvard, NYU) are convinced that Columbia students are all gunners who only care about making millions in corporate jobs. I’m not sure where that comes from. (Then again, I only spent two days there.)

One thing I noticed about Harvard was that everyone seemed to brag about how little work they did. Maybe it was just the people I met, but I heard a lot of, “Working on two journals is no problem — with our workload, you could probably do three journals.” And “Yeah, I spent the day playing frisbee in the Yard. I’ll do the reading Monday morning. I don’t have class until noon anyway.” I guess it’s better than the alternative — “OHMYGODMYPAPERISDUEINTHREEHOURSANDI’VEONLYWRITTENNINETYPAGES!”

I went to Alan Dershowitz’s talk and I thought he was amazing. It’s interesting to hear his students think his class is The Alan Dershowitz Show — I can see that happening. In fact, toward the end of his talk, somebody asked him how much interaction he has with his students, and he said, “You want to know? Rent Reversal of Fortune and you’ll see how closely I work with my students.”