The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/class-of-2021/)
Dressed in caps, gowns, tassels and graduation cords, many students in the Class of 2021 lined Schoellkopf Field this weekend for the first in-person graduation since December 2019.
After ordering commencement apparel through supplier Herff Jones, graduating seniors experienced delays, product errors and identity theft.
I met my Freshman year roommate on Facebook. He seemed nice enough and worried about the possibility of roommate disaster. I was happy to commit to 9 months in the same shoe box with him. The night before move-in day, my family drove up to Ithaca and we spent the night in a small hotel about 10 minutes outside of the city. I walked into the lobby, bubbling with excitement, nervous for my first day of school. My new roommate, off the plane from Taiwan, was the first face I saw.
After one of the most important people in my life was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer during my senior year of high school, I experienced a period of early maturity in which I became intimately aware of how important time is. I was no longer able to relate to the friends I surrounded myself with since childhood and I no longer recognized myself.
When you put a minimalist and a maximalist in a room together at 18 and tell them to make the arrangement work, it makes no sense that ours did. For four years, we inhabited two different Cornells, but we worked as roommates because we both wanted to create the same Cornell: a place where you can be both soft and strong, thriving and hurt, grounded in your being and terrified of your becoming.
For every event missed because I was covering a game or asking questions at a presser, I created an entirely different set of memories that I’ll look back on whenever I think about my college years. From going to an ECAC Tournament and sleeping on the freezing cold hotel room floor to complaining about Midnight Edit at one of The Sun’s infamous last-night-of-publishing parties, I got to be a part of some pretty memorable times.
I feel torn between an unwillingness to believe fatalistically in endings, and a fear that I might be underemphasizing the uniqueness of being at Cornell and at Ithaca. The above quote feels like an important reminder: the urgency with which I need to love remains throughout my life. What changes is the context and circumstances through which I can love people, pursuits and causes.
It’s hard. Harder than you expected. It’s not a straight or predictable path to the finish line. Your seasonal affective disorder will not serve you. Balancing work and life is an impossible pursuit, and the weather is depressing for 75 percent of the year. But you are lucky to attend school in one of the most beautiful, vibrant, crunchy college towns in the country! You can find fulfillment if only you step out of your comfort zone, and say yes to dinner invites! The Commons is only 15 minutes away if you sprint down Buffalo Street! This place has so much to offer beyond academics! Oh, and no, you will not master latte art, but you will master mediocre barista-ing at your dream workplace — CTB!
Growing up, I always sought an older brother figure, and I got that from Bill. I took his music taste, his hand-me-downs and later his love of writing. I spent Thanksgiving with him, and after debating Mac Miller’s discography for hours, I wrote my first article for The Sun (which was rejected by Pete which convinced me to compet for assistant Arts and Entertainment editor so that I could force it through). That conversation in 2019 came out of nowhere, and reminded me why I started writing in the first place.
So how did someone as antisocial as I decide that college journalism was a fine way to spend the past three years? Writing gave me the opportunity to create a barrier between a painful and often disappointing reality, and my own psyche. There’s so much information — superfluous or otherwise — jockeying for attention in one’s head at every moment, muddying any sense of inner peace or mental clarity. Writing let me take a second, a minute, an hour to gather my thoughts and consider the message of what I was creating.