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New York City / Columbia University
SIPA and New York City
In 1897, when Columbia University's trustees decided to relocate the school from East 49th Street to Morningside Heights, a green and leafy plateau overlooking Harlem, Central Park, Midtown and downtown Manhattan, they created a unique urban campus surrounded by distinctive neoclassical buildings. It offered students a refuge from the hurly-burly New York, but still linked them to New York City and its institutions.
Columbia University's location remains a vital asset to this day, where students benefit from Manhattan's incomparable career opportunities and its flourishing commercial and cultural life. SIPA students can intern during the semester at the United Nations or one of the major broadcast networks, hone their skills in a practicum designed to meet the needs of real-world clients, or attend lectures by visiting heads of state, government leaders, and busines executives. New York City is a living laboratory where students can view the consequences of public policy and apply the city's experience to challenges at the furthest reaches of the globe.
The vibrant and culturally diverse Upper West Side, just beyond the campus gates, provides a center for student social life and a place for many students to call home during their years at SIPA. Columbia University is a leading international institution in the heart of the world's most international city—a combination no other school can offer.
SIPA and Columbia University
As part of the Columbia community, SIPA students are often said to be spoiled for choice. They have access to the resources of a major urban university comprising 16 separate schools, 22 libraries, and five affiliated institutions. During any given year, they choose more than 1,000 courses offered throughout the University, drawing on the resources of the social science departments and the schools of business, law, journalism, social work, public health, engineering and applied science, and architecture, as well as Teachers College.
In a typical month they can supplement those courses with scores of lectures, presentations, seminars, and documentary films sponsored by the Earth Institute, the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, the Humanitarian Affairs Program, and more than a dozen other specialized programs and regional institutes, along with a variety of student groups.
Recent events have included visits by Michelle Bachelet, executive director of UN Women and former president of Chile; Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Laureate; Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York; José Manuel Barroso, European Commission President; and SIPA's Global Leadership Awards, honoring Paul Volcker, former Fed chairman; WITNESS, the international human rights advocacy group; and alumnus Mitchell Silber, director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department.
Students also have the opportunity to participate in a range of Capstone Workshops and extracurricular activities with direct relevance to their fields of study, from tutoring at-risk children in Harlem to lobbying the U.S. government on its response to AIDS in Africa.