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New York City / Columbia University
SIPA and New York City
In 1897 when Columbia's trustees decided to relocate the school from Forty-ninth Street to Morningside Heights, a green and leafy plateau overlooking 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 closely linked them to the city and its institutions. The 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 talks by visiting heads of state and CEOs. New York is itself 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 both a center for student social life and a place for many students to call home during their years at SIPA. Columbia is a leading international university 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 5 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 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. Some recent topics of discussion at these events have included United States tax policy, the transformation of Uruguay's armed forces, and the politics of succession in Central Asia. Just as important , students also have the opportunity to participate in a range of 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.