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 Dear prospective student:
Columbia University is proud to have one of the oldest and most distinguished graduate schools in the United States. Situated on a beautiful campus in New York City, in close proximity to many of the great cultural and economic institutions of the United States, it is an ideal place to pursue graduate education.
Your first decision will be to decide between a Masters programs and a Ph.D. program. As you can see from our Academic Programs Page , we offer a very rich array of Masters Programs, all the way from programs that are decidedly and proudly “non-professional”, such as the Liberal Studies Masters programs through programs that are introductions to disciplines, such as the ones in East Asian Languages and Cultures and English , to interdisciplinary programs such as Philosophical Foundations of Physics and Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences to programs that offer immediate added-value in a profession, such as the Biotechnology and Mathematical Finance M.A.s. All the Masters programs we offer are designed to be completed in at most two academic years if you study fulltiime, and many in less than that.
The other degree we offer is the Ph.D. This is the essential credential for teaching and doing research in higher education and other research settings. This degree will allow you to become a professional in a scholarly field. Naturally, this takes significantly longer than the M.A. (in fact all Ph.D. students pick up the M.A. en route to the Ph.D.): from four to seven years, depending on the field. This is not the same as enjoying a subject, which may be enough to make an undergraduate major While all Ph.D. programs start off with several years of course work, the main requirement of the degree is the Ph. D. dissertation, a substantial independent piece of research which heralds your transformation from a consumer to a producer of knowledge. Because of the arduousness of this degree, significant financial aid is offered to all admitted students who request it.
Graduate school should be intellectually exhilarating and challenging. If you are fortunate, you will find a field that fascinates you and which elicits from you a passionate commitment. Once you have identified those programs that you find most exciting, we encourage you to speak directly with the faculty of the programs that interest you for a more comprehensive understanding of what advanced study in those particular fields involves. Graduate school is hard work and will call upon resources you may not realize you have. But it is also the door to many paths, the opportunity to exercise your creativity and to acquire self-confidence and a strong sense of what you are about. In the continuing analysis, graduate school provides the first synthesis, the assembly of the mind and the habits that will carry you forward under your own steam. Columbia has much to offer you, and we hope you will seek us out. We look forward to your further inquiry.
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