California

California is home to many Columbia students who do not hail from the East Coast. It's often amusing to watch California freshmen's reaction to the first snow (or, depending on your perspective, more amusing to watch as they begin to understand what a northeast winter is like several months on). It's also a lot of fun to see them getting lost on the subway.

Like most city dwellers in the United States, students from San Francisco and Los Angeles insist on asserting their cities' superiority over New York City. They may or may not have a point. In any case, Californians tend to be neither the most arrogant nor the most narrow-minded people on earth, which is more than can be said of New Yorkers.