For more than 250 years, Columbia University in New York City has led the conversation academically and culturally. The community is passionate, engaged, and lively. Sometimes really lively. And they like being in the heart of the action. Most of all, though, they’re smart. Students at Columbia want to be at the forefront of whatever it is they are passionate about, whether it’s through assisting with research, working in a lab, or pushing a field forward.
Columbia is a very large university, but it is broken down into small college communities that all exist alongside each other and often overlap. There are three undergraduate colleges: Columbia College, the College of Engineering, and Columbia General Studies. High school students are eligible to apply to either Columbia College or Engineering (General Studies is for non-traditional students). Across all three, there are 9,700 students. Applicants also have the option to aim for the Combined Plan, which leads to both a B.A. in Liberal Arts and a B.S. in Engineering, received simultaneously.
Within each of the undergraduate colleges, students pursue a liberal arts curriculum grounded in the Columbia Core, one of the most iconic traditional foundational liberal arts programs in the game. Students at Columbia study what is happening today, but ground what they learn in the past through required courses in music history, art history, the classics, and more.
In addition to being one of the most impressive universities in the United States, Columbia is also one of the most sought-after. They receive nearly 60,000 applications for the first-year class, and the acceptance rate is about 4%. The rate of admission has been under 10% for over a decade, showing Columbia’s staying power through thick and thin.
Getting in, then, requires planning. In this post, we’ll break down what you need to know when planning your summers if you have Columbia at the top of your list.
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What does Columbia want to see from your summer?
When Columbia looks at your application, they don’t just give it a read and make a decision. It’s a process. First, you need to meet the academic expectations of excellence. But if all this took was grades it would be easy. Instead, there is more they are looking for. The Columbia admissions review is holistic, so they look at all parts of you — they want to see the thinker, the doer, the creative, and the dream. It’s important to show them that there is a lot to see, in a focused and direct package, and summers are a great way to strengthen these facets of your application.
Augment Your Academics
Summers are fantastic for building up your academic credentials beyond what your high school offers. We highly recommend that students use their summers to do this type of academic reinforcement through courses, research positions, or independent research.
Courses: Rising juniors or seniors should consider taking at least one accredited, in-person or online, summer course with a local university or college. While online courses are available and often very good, we do encourage students to take an in-person class if there are options available. Most colleges have summer courses open to high school students, so seek one out that allows you to go deeper into a subject you’re already passionate about. For example, if you can’t get enough of biology, look for a course that focuses in on a specific area of the biological sphere.
Research Positions: It may come as a surprise to you, but there are opportunities available for high school students to assist with lab or library-based academic research — and Columbia loves research. They boast 87 Nobel Laureates and 400 inventions annually. Don’t try Googling for research positions, though, as few are likely to come up. You’ll need to reach out to academics and scientists individually to inquire about whether there are ways you can help out. We help students find these types of opportunities, but if you want to try on your own start by brushing up your resume, writing a compelling cover sheet, and putting together a shortlist of people you are one or two degrees removed from (for example, friends of your parents) that may be able to offer you a role or to link you to a connection of their own.
Independent Research: With so much information available easily through digitization, we see more and more students undertaking independent research projects. This isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it can be an amazing experience and learning opportunity, but we caution students that work that isn’t review or published by a journal open to high schoolers may not aid your application very much. Self-publishing is accessible, but it isn’t significantly respected by admissions officials in an era when nearly anyone can be an ‘author’ in name but not necessarily in vigor. So independent research can be one aspect of your application, but you shouldn’t fill your whole summer with it.
Emphasize Your Interests
Parallel (and occasionally overlapping) with augmenting your academics, we encourage students to lean into the summer as a time to put an exclamation mark on what interests them most. This can best be done through three avenues: internships, employment, and service.
Internships: Internships are an amazing way of further exploring something like you would do in a course, but with a mentorship-type structure that can also potentially lead to a strong additional or supplemental recommendation when it comes time to apply. Your internship can be in the non-profit world or with a business, but it should connect to your academic interests or future career goals. Don’t hold out for a perfect match, though. If you’re interested in starting a business someday, you don’t need to intern with a company close to what you want to do. Instead, look for a leader you’d want to learn from. Your dream may not be running a car dealership, for example, but interning with a parent of a friend who own’s a car dealership could teach you about leadership, team management, and more. Most importantly, though, you should never pay for an internship and any internship must be at least two weeks long (if full-time).
Jobs: We are major fans of high schoolers getting a summer job at least once before applying to college. Employment shows something that no course, internship, or summer program can. As an employee, you’re held to a standard that is high, and to keep the job you have to meet or exceed it. Don’t get caught up in a job looking ‘fancy’, though. You’re in high school. Fancy can actually look suspicious. Whether you’re popping popcorn at a movie theater or coordinating camp activities for a day-camp, you are learning, growing, and collecting a lot of stories to work into your applications.
Service: Columbia cares about their community, both on campus and in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of NYC. They want to know that you care, too, and so they love to see some type of service on your application and summer is a great time to do it. However, there are a few guidelines we recommend you follow. Any service should be focused, working with a program or organization towards a specific goal. Any service should be long-term, ideally spanning more than just a summer. And any service should be local. Doing volunteer work close to home shows a connection to your community that traveling to give back simply doesn’t communicate.
What about Summer Programs?
Columbia offers a variety of summer programs geared towards high school students. It’s easy to jump at them as a way to become ‘known’ to admissions, maybe getting your name in their minds, but we caution students (and the parents who are most often paying for summer programs) to approach university summer programs cautiously.
Now, the Columbia summer programs are epic. They offer fun experiences with academic backbones, but attending a summer program at a university you are interested in is neither a backdoor nor a shortcut into eventual acceptance. Most of the time, it won’t help you at all
This is because of a few factors. First, far more students take part in the summer programs than can be admitted into a first-year class. Next, even selective summer programs are not as selective as the university or college itself, so getting into a summer program doesn’t mean you’re qualified to get into the school as a fully-fledged student.
Doing a Columbia summer program can also actually weaken your application, as weird as that may sound. Why? Because time is limited. How you use your summer is critically important, and we want you to use that time to differentiate yourself from other students. Doing a big summer program for a large university like Columbia can be the opposite of differentiating, as thousands of other students — who are also likely to apply to Columbia — will be doing the same thing. So, do you want to do something that looks similar to loads of other applicants, or to do something totally your own?
We encourage students to look back at our recommendations for internships, jobs, research, and exploration and craft a summer experience that is uniquely yours, instead of signing up for one of the Columbia summer programs.
When you’re applying to Columbia, you need to keep in mind that they’ll be reviewing your application as a committee, discussing who you are and what you would bring to the first-year class in a collaborative (and occasionally combative) setting. Use your summers to give them things to advocate for in your application. Show that you’re a top student, of course, but curiosity, teamwork and collaboration, and the strength of your voice are as important as anything else!
If Columbia is at the top of your list, get in touch. Every year, we help strong students write exceptional applications that gain offers of admission from Columbia.