required reading: academics

Though Columbia College, School of General Studies, and Barnard require at least two science courses for graduation, don’t worry if you’re not so scientifically inclined. You don’t have to take General Chemistry or Cell Biology. We’ve consulted Columbia's list of courses designed for nonscience majors, the Columbia Undergrad Listing of Professor Ability (CULPA), and course reviews on Vergil+ to find courses offered in fall 2019 that will allow you to knock out the science requirement without tanking your GPA.

Fulfilling all of your Modes of Thinking requirements can be a challenging thing to do. Often, you’ll look through the list of classes and find one that immediately interests you because it’s related to your potential major or minor, but every once in a while, you’ll stumble across a Mode of Thinking that you’re not quite sure how to fulfill. To provide some inspiration about classes you can take for those difficult-to-fulfill requirements, here’s a list of some highly recommended classes for each Mode of Thinking.

Class of 2024: Welcome to college! You’re going to take over 60 classes throughout your years at Columbia and Barnard. Apart from the required Core or Foundation classes, the rest is pretty much up to you. You may not know what classes to pick immediately, but we’ve got you covered. Here’s our list of some interesting intro-level lectures that you may want to try out your first semester!

From maximizing your Lit Hum experience with a decent professor to not eating alone in Ferris, we’re sure there are many things about being a first-year at Barnumbia that still worry you, despite all our past coverage on Required Reading.

By now you should be pre-registration pros, but what comes next? If you remember from the first part of this two-part registration series, you’ll actually have to do a bit of waiting— pre-registration only confirms your sections for Lit Hum and UWriting/FroSci (Columbia College), UWriting/Art of Engineering (SEAS), or First-Year Writing/Seminar (Barnard). You’ll finally be able to register for the rest of your classes during NSOP, and then you can add or drop any other courses through the fall shopping period, which covers the first two weeks of classes.

It might be the summer, but a lot of you seem to be eager to get back to school. How do we know? Because about 80 percent of the posts on the Columbia and Barnard class of 2021 pages are questions about pre-registration, what it means to shop for classes, and how to pick courses given your AP/IB/dual credit/life experience credentials.

In case the nice weather of late has been making your head fuzzy (or you just haven’t been paying attention), today’s the first day of fall 2017 course registration. If you already have your Thinking Locally and Science requirements squared away (while still making room for some obscure, but interesting classes), make sure you pay some attention to that Arts/Humanities gen ed req. Here’s the best of what’s being offered next semester.

Unlike several of Barnard’s other gen ed requirements (such as Arts/Humanities), there isn’t a super long list of classes that will fulfill Thinking Technologically and Digitally. However, it’s pretty hard to get around this requirement, so you might as well bite the bullet and get it over with. If you’re still struggling to fulfill the more techy side of the Foundations curriculum, here are some classes you should consider taking.

Considering Columbia’s size and number of academic departments, there’s no shortage of libraries on campus. Sure, Butler may feel like an omnipotent presence, but if you’re willing to do a little exploring you might just stumble upon your new favorite study spot. To save yourself a bit of effort, though, you can look through these reviews of a couple of libraries on campus and hopefully get inspired to branch out beyond Butler.

With all the focus on the Core Curriculum and Columbia College, sometimes the School of Engineering and Applied Science feels a little left out. Don’t worry, future engineers! If you’re trying to see what the next four years will look like, the SEAS bulletin is a good resource. It details the courses you’ll have to take, but sometimes it seems a little outdated, and it doesn’t really tell you what’s going on.