The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/author/fahmad/)
Well, we made it. We have at long last reached the end of the road. It was a tough journey, certainly not one for the faint of heart, but despite all the pain, I believe it was worth it. This right here is my last column. As I sit write, I have to admit I’m glad I decided to go to Olin to do this because I can already feel the emotions that would no doubt have poured out in the form of tears if I wasn’t in a public place.
Long before I became a regular columnist for The Sun, I sent in a letter to the editor about being a Muslim student at Cornell. If I’m being honest, the article could have been a feel-good piece, but it turned out to be more of an angry rant about a series of unpleasant interactions I had during my first year. I’ll admit that it was written somewhat from a place of cynicism, and most definitely from a place of bitterness. Some things weren’t phrased in as polished a way as they could have been, but can you blame me? I was a furious freshman, and an idiot.
If I’m being completely honest, I hated Cornell when I first started attending. It was nothing personal, it was mainly just a combination of homesickness, intimidation and the infamous adjustment period. Unfortunately, my so-called adjustment period felt more like a chronic state and lasted much, much longer than I anticipated. When I look back at my time here — something that I tend to do a lot these days as it’s my last semester — I realize that the primary reason I got through it, and eventually began to love Cornell, was because of the mentors I’ve had along the way. In my freshman year, against this background of inner turmoil and a sense of not fitting in, I was simultaneously trying to orient myself onto the pre-med track.
This past weekend, the internet informed me about yet another native-English speaker lashing out at someone for being able to speak more than one language. Unfortunately, this is not a novel incident. Over the past few years, we’ve all become accustomed to various instances of people who are a little bit too in love with the English language. What makes this particular incident different, however, is the fact that the perpetrator was not some screaming dude in a mall being filmed on a bystander’s iPhone. Rather, it was Duke University Prof. Megan Neely, biostatistics, who sent an email to her graduate students advising international students to stop speaking Chinese amongst each other and instead speak English at all times.