Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Columbia Student chat, Info session, Class visit

Student Chat - 3/27/2006
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I went slightly early to the admissions staff. Met a first year student, who will be in the student chat. Talked to him for sometime and then went to the Fin Aid office, where I met an officer and she said that its too early to discuss in detail about fin aid and just told me the basic stuff.

7 people came for the student chat. I thought there will be more students but good for us. A second year student also attended the chat. Started with the introduction of each member. No two members have the same profile/aspirations and No two of us will be in the same pool when we apply for Fall 07. An entrepreneur from India(he actually came from India and not staying here), non-profit, Consulting etc .. location wise, India, China, US, Europe.

After the introduction, different questions were asked. Questions ranged from acads, clusters, career services, housing, bidding(some interesting facts about the newly proposed bids), happy hours, study groups to finally the expectations of the chat hosts. Many are met and the others are not really negatives.

Ended the session with exchanging mail-ids.

Info Session - 3/27/2006
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An admissions officer and 3 students hosted this session. Students talked in detial about their background, career aspirations and the summer interns.

Admissions officer started the presentation and whenever there is anything that is related to students such as clusters, clubs etc, current students gave examples and talked in detail. Much of the detail is already covered in our student chat, so not much new information but new thoughts from other students.

Finally the session ended with the admissions deadlines(not for Fall 07 but for Fall 06) and the admissions process. Questions are asked throughout the session.

Now time for a class visit. I looked into the class schedule and planned to visit "Fixed Income Derivatives" class. Though it is a higher level course with some prerequisities I want to attend that class. I have some knowledge about this domain so thought it will make some sence to go to this class initially and then later in the fall will go with a student host to any other class.

Class visit - 3/28/2006
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Fixed Income derivatives by Prof Cord Howard(MD, Morgan Stanley) and guest lecture by Mr Lustig(MD, BlackRock).
Class lasted for some 3 1/2 hours with the first part by Mr Howard, who talked about the Inverse Floaters, Fall of "Orange County" during 1994. I was able to understand the concepts but the equations just flew above my head. Class participation is good, though not everybody participated, the professor is asking questions in between the class.

Second part is about Mortgage Backed Securities by Mr Lustig. He is hilarious, half the time all the class is laughing. I know about MBS, so class didn't look alien to me. He started the basics and then in between he talked about the recent deal between BlackRock and Merrill.

Altogether - I loved Columbia. Have a very good feeling about Columbia and I would be confortable there. Should talk to more students. esp students who are close to my profile/aspirations.

5 comments:

Marina said...

YAY! I cannot wait to finally visit the school this week

SG said...

Vikram, you need to write to Brad(http://hella.opencoder.org/applicantblogs/), and ask him to add your name to the list.

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