Barnard College Top Questions

Academics is really important at Barnard. Because we have complete cross-registration privileges with Columbia, there are an incredible number of classes to choose from and the faculty are amazing. It's a smaller school, so teachers are very available and happy to speak with students. Students definitely have intellectual discussions outside of class. Every first-year is required to take an English and a Seminar and if you have the opportunity, the most amazing Seminar is one called Reacting to the Past. It's run as a series of games (three) over the course of the semester, in which students act out periods in history. For example, the first game took place in Athens in 403 BCE. We were all members of the Athenian assembly. As Athens had just suffered a crushing defeat to Sparta, it was our job to make laws and determine how bring Athens back to glory. We each had roles and positions and we spent our classes arguing about who should be allowed to vote, about whether we should send military expeditions off to raise money, about what to do concerning education. It was amazing how seriously everyone took their roles. The game is fascinating because you really get to experience periods and time and interact with texts (like Plato's Republic) as if they're real things, not just classic books that some professor forces you to read.

Academics are superb! Barnard professors TRULY CARE about their students! They really are interested in each of their student's emotional, social, and academic well-being. I have never been in any class at Barnard where I didn't feel like my professor wanted each of us to succeed. I love how every one of my professors has always known my name and a bunch of tidbits about my peers and I. Class participation is pretty much the norm. It's wonderful because it adds so much to our overall learning experiences while fostering our public speaking skills and even confidence. I unfortunately don't spend a lot of time with my professors outside of the classroom, but that was my personal decision (due to being so busy with other things on campus). If I every want to, the option is alwayts here, as each of my professors has been incredibly accessible and welcoming. I LOVE Barnard's academic requirements. We have a distribution consiting of our 9 ways of knowing, which are broad categories in which we must take a course in before we graduate. As dull as this may sound, all of the categories have a huge range of interesting courses to choose from, and it's very easy to fulfill the requirements without even trying to! In fulfilling my requirements, I have taken some of my favorite courses so far at Barnard, such as Reacting to the Past II, The Novel and Psychoanalysis, and Dance in New York City. I also feel like our requirements really foster an education of the whole person while allowing each of us to graduate with a great range of knowledge outside of our major areas.

I would venture to say that more Barnard professors take time to learn their students names than Columbia professors whose lectures are much bigger. My favorite class was a historical survey of American religion- the class that made me a religion major. The professor was enthusiastic about the subject, approachable outside of class and probably the most intelligent man on earth. Barnard is definitely a place where at times I feel as if the competitive nature of the school cannot be good for the emotional well-being of the students, but everyone seems to get along fairly well. That being said I would guess that most people have to go see a counselor at some point in their time here.

Academics at Barnard are very strong. Really interesting courses, great teachers who know your name and are generally available for extra help. Students are super studious. You know the saying "work hard, play hard"? Well Barnard students work very hard and play so so. I'm an Urban Studies student which is great because a lot of my class projects involve getting outside of the classroom and doing field research...and what better place to be for Urban Studies research than NYC?

All of my professors this year know who I am and what kind of student I am. The classes that I've chosen to be in are generally 15 people or below, and I might have one class with about 40 students every semester. Because the professors at Barnard are not focused on graduate students, the undergraduates at Barnard are their main focus and professors are generally very available and more than happy to have a conversation with a student outside of class. I'm currently majoring in architecture, and am very happy with the department so far. The program is very intense, but it's a major that is incredibly rewarding and in which you form very close relationships with your classmates. There is also plenty of cross-over between the undergraduate school at Barnard and the graduate school at Columbia, and I am currently taking a graduate seminar at Columbia's architecture school.

My favorite class is Applied Ecology and Evolution. It's a great class, only 7 girls in total, 5 of which are Biology majors, 2 which are just generally interested. It is an upper level class so the course load can be challenging but the professor is wonderful and more than happy to sit with you all night long helping you on a problem set if need be.

Difficult. Just as hard as columbia except the professor's tend to care more about individual students.

Classes vary greatly in size and difficulty. I've had a class of 200 and a class of 4. My hardest and easiest classes have both been at Barnard (you also can take classes at the other Columbia schools). All in all college is easier than I expected, although certainly not normally easy. Studying is a pretty normal pastime; I'm not sure how it is at other schools, but here you generally spend a lot of time in the library (Columbia's library, that is...the Barnard library is drab, doesn't have a lot of the books you'll need, and is generally a really depressing place in which to study, at least for me). Of course this is an individual choice: I'm sure there are some people who've never seen the inside of the library. Students are competitive, but the environment remains encouraging, especially in Barnard seminars, colloquiums, or first-year classes, which are usually made up of groups of 10-15 women. A great thing about Barnard is the Reacting to the Past classes - they're all over the country now, but they started here - where you embody a character from a certain time period and try to complete your "victory objectives" while interacting with the other characters....it's a little hard to explain, but you basically live in another place and time period for a while. I cannot say enough good things about this program. It is incredibly well-done and so interesting (you will definitely remember that time in history...you were THERE).

I love my friends from high school. They are fun and great and always ready for a good time, but I have never had a conversation with them about my favorite book or the merits of Shakespeare's tragedies over his comedies. That was by far the most refreshing change of coming to Barnard, that students were not only well-read, but well versed in talking about literature or current events or history or anything really, and had opinions and thoughts that they wanted other people to share. Barnard really fosters this sense of the importance of sharing your opinions.

If you want your professor to know your name, he or she will. Our largest lectures are for the intro to sciences, and those are only 160 or so people, a lot of them Columbia students. If you walk up to your professor and tell them your name in the course of a conversation, chances are they will know it the next time you see them. My least favorite class was a statistics class. The professor was new and not very good at explaining things. I had to drop out. It was terrible. I love my history classes, though. I took one called Merchants, Pirates, Slaves and the Making of Atlantic Capitalism--the class was so popular that the late students always sat on the floor. The readings were interesting and the professor was knowledgeable about his subject. It was a fun class. The students at Barnard are competitive, but not in the backstabbing sort of way. We might ask how you did on a paper to see how we measure up, but we will also answer "all right" and "really well" instead of discussing actual grades.