Opinion

GROSKAUFMANIS | Odds and Ends

By |

It only took a few hours after my brother dropped me off at my freshman dorm for me to text him something along the lines of “I don’t think I’m going to like it here.” In some ways I was right. But  in more ways, I was wrong. My time at Cornell has since followed a pretty common formula: I arrived and found that this school is not necessarily the easiest place to be immediately happy. Eventually I started to like it more, recently I grew to love it and now it’s almost time for me to leave. I imagined before coming here that my favorite moments would conform to Cornell-y college tropes: throwing fish onto the ice at hockey games with some kind of regularity and watching daily sunsets over Libe Slope.

Opinion

GROSKAUFMANIS | What to Expect When You Don’t Want to Be Expecting

By |

It took Cornell senior Maddie* three doctor’s visits to find a birth control option that worked for her. While trying to find the right contraception, Maddie worried about how different forms might affect her recovery process from eating disorders. Weight gain and mood changes were among her concerns, but her main focus was which option would allow her to keep a regular, monthly menstrual cycle — something that can be an important indicator of appropriate weight and overall health for those in recovery. Although her medical records indicate a history of anorexia, Maddie said her experience with it didn’t come up in visits until she finally brought it up herself during her third appointment. After reading a study on how different forms of birth control can be better suited for those with anorexia, she felt compelled to raise the issue.

Opinion

GROSKAUFMANIS | The Cost of the Admissions Process

By |

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged fifty people in a plot to illegally buy admission to elite colleges like Stanford, Yale and University of Southern California for their children.  The U.S. attorney for the district of Massachusetts, Andrew E. Lelling, deemed the case the “largest college admissions scandal ever prosecuted.” Among those investigated by the FBI was a Cornell alumnus charged with fraud for paying $75,000 to rig his daughter’s ACT score. “There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy,” Lelling said, perhaps accidentally highlighting the fact that, legal or illegal, there effectively always has been. This investigation has put what most students already know onto the public’s collective radar: The college admissions process rests on a playing field that is almost vertically tilted in favor of rich applicants. To everyone who has been paying attention, this revelation is almost entirely unsurprising.

Columns

GROSKAUFMANIS | Two College Students Walk into a Comedy Show

By |

Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld, two of America’s most well-respected veteran comedians, won’t perform on college campuses. Their reasoning centers around the usual complaints about political correctness, assuming that today’s young people don’t appreciate, or maybe can’t even handle, the types of humor they tend to use in their sets. High-profile examples of clashes between college audiences and comedians are ripe for cherry-picking. Last December Nimesh Patel, a writer for SNL, was pulled off stage in the middle of a set at Columbia University after one of his jokes was deemed too offensive for the event: an example that fits snuggly into the idea that college students can’t take a joke. But in an op-ed in The New York Times that followed the incident, Patel himself acknowledged a complexity that this stereotype doesn’t completely capture, writing, “I do not think we should let the actions of a small group — actions that get blown out of proportion because they feed a narrative many people want to hear — paint college campuses as bad places to perform and paint this next generation as doomed.”
I talked to students who perform comedy at Cornell, at other universities and in cities across the United States.

Columns

GROSKAUFMANIS | Casual Dysfunction and the College Experience

By |

So much of the stereotypical American college experience, as it’s packaged in pop culture and the memories of nostalgic alumni, seems to be wrapped up in anticipation — and sometimes the romanticization — of dysfunction. Even in the age of hyper-attention to self-care, college remains a bubble in which it’s normal, even commendable, to do things like pull successive all-nighters in the name of work or push passions onto the back burner because they don’t fit our notions of productivity. Staying up all night to study is presented as evidence of a strong work ethic, rather than an unhealthy last resort. At Harvard, students in the class of 2022 were even asked to complete an online “Sleep 101” course, designed to help them develop healthy sleep habits in an environment as “competitive and busy” as college. It is particularly within the context of any work hard, play hard environment, where opposite and sometimes incompatible extremes regarding school and going out are expected to exist simultaneously, that a lot of unsustainable behavior is necessitated.

Columns

GROSKAUFMANIS | At Least You’re Having Fun

By |

I’m not great at painting, but this semester I spent about six hours a week in Tjaden trying to paint anyways. On somewhat of a whim, I took a friend’s advice and signed up for an introductory art class. I was definitely the least experienced in the class. And still, the environment it created — where I had room to mess up and get better, where I was out of my element and felt no pressure to make anything perfect — brought me a kind of peace that I haven’t found in many other spaces here at Cornell. I painted everything from a portrait of a stranger to an exterior of the Cornell Sun building (that I ultimately had to call “abstract” because it was unforgivingly unrealistic.)

Every few weeks, we would have class-wide critiques where I’d nervously hang my attempts on the wall next to perfect, often photo-like pieces done by freshman Fine Arts students.

clothing

GROSKAUFMANIS | Actions Speak Louder Than Wardrobes

By |

Today’s cover of the New Yorker shows Barry Blitt’s “Welcome to Congress,” a moving visual tribute to the historic number of women who have been elected to serve in the Congress. The cartoon features figures that appear to be Sharice Davids J.D. ’10, one of the first female Native Americans elected to Congress and the first openly LGBTQ representative elected from Kansas, Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who at 29 is the youngest woman to ever be elected to Congress. By now most of us have heard these names and registered these accomplishments, but the New Yorker cover really communicates how this election cycle was a monumental deviation from the status quo. However, an obvious consequence of change is pushback, and not all media has been as welcoming to this group of trailblazers. Last week, the internet erupted into controversy over, of all things, Ocasio-Cortez’s wardrobe — which is a really disappointing sentence to be typing in 2018.

Columns

GROSKAUFMANIS | Electing to Show Up

By |

 

The first election I ever voted in was a down-ballot wipeout, at least with respect to the people I was voting for.  My introduction to the democratic process was coupled with my introduction to large-scale electoral loss, and like many others, it was a loss that I didn’t see coming. I remember exactly how I felt on the morning of November 9, 2016: dejected, blind-sided, stupid.  (Also cold, because the weather that day in Ithaca was rainy and dramatic.) Before election day, I had listened to one too many episodes of the FiveThirtyEight elections podcast, interpreting their analysis to mean that there wasn’t much to worry about, so I didn’t.  The lead up to the 2016 election, at least for myself, was a lot of preemptive, unearned celebration of a victory that never came to fruition.

Columns

GROSKAUFMANIS | Land of Second Chances

By |

Two years ago, while sitting on a roof in Collegetown, I saw a girl run barefoot down Catherine Street holding an open handle of Absolut while zig-zagging away from a cop who, from my vantage point, was palpably frustrated but remarkably patient. I couldn’t see what happened when they reached the bottom of the hill, or if the girl — probably drunk and potentially underaged — got into any kind of trouble. But if she did, it was probably a muted version of the kind of punishment one might receive outside this unusual land of second chances. Relative to other places, there seems to be little consequence for “bad behavior” at Cornell. Sure, on any given weekend in Collegetown you may see an officer lecturing a freshman about an open container or someone being written up for peeing in public, but for the most part, illegal behavior here — in this uniquely privileged, unusually wealthy bubble we live in — seems to happen with near impunity.