Columbia University is very well reputed and is an Ivy League. My final choices were to choose between CMU and Columbia and talking with seniors studying at both these universities, I decided to go ahead with Columbia.
Course Curriculum
The courses are very practical and industry relevant. In general, the students have full flexibility to choose courses and it is up to us to choose an industry based course or a research course. I am personally doing industry relevant courses in deep learning.
Exams
My scores: GRE Quants section - 168 Verbal section - 151 AWA - 3.5 TOEFL 110/120
Placement
As a current student I can say about existing stats since I haven't personally gotten to this stage. The median salary for MS CS students is around $100,000. Students mostly depend on applying through company websites than career fairs (like most colleges in the US).
Internship
I haven't gotten an internship yet.
Fees
One credit as of 2021 costs $2200. MS students are expected to complete 30 credits to be eligible for getting their degree.
Scholarship
No
Faculty
Columbia has a faculty to student ratio of 6:1. So far all my professors were very approachable and highly knowledgeable and have had huge impacts in research in their particular fields. For example, the developer of C++ teaches C++ course here, the same applies to the developer of VoIP. We even have Stein, the author of CLRS (known to be the bible of algorithms) teaching algorithms here. I was personally impacted by Prof. Peter Belhumeur, who teaches Computer Vision at Columbia.
Campus Life
There are many clubs (both tech and non tech) and have access to very good resources. Being an Ivy League, it goes without saying that Columbia has excellent sports teams and facilities. There are multiple libraries and some are open (24/7) and there is free WiFi throughout the campus.
Hostel
Students here mostly share apartments as a group of 2-4. And the average rent per person varies from about $800 to $1200 per month. This is relatively expensive as the location is one lies at the heart of Manhattan, New York. Food costs can be managed to about $500 per month.
