The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/opinion/page/2/)
For Cornell specifically, the North Campus expansion project could be a really good opportunity to mitigate some of the damage; though instead of increasing enrollment with the facilities, the University should focus on attracting and housing current students. The requirement to live on campus through sophomore year should help ease the pressure of students in Collegetown, but is it enough?
I was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society in seventh grade. Our mentors were eighth-graders seasoned by nothing more than hours of community service that most either forged or substituted for familial favors. Following their footsteps, we were to stand in the middle school gymnasium and be introduced to the families of spectators in the bleachers, ending with our career aspirations. I was freshly thirteen and my future plans were far from concrete.
Yes, everyone is entitled to their own opinions based on their experiences. However, saying legacy admissions are needed to keep elite schools running as a business is the opposite of owning privilege. It’s a way to use privilege as an advantage to keep non-legacy admits beneath you regardless of their other identities. Such is a form of oppression, not a form of “school pride,” as the article claims.
All this stress and worry raises a valuable question: why? Why do we toil so much over our resumes, to the point of unhealthy self-comparisons? Why do we pursue shiny executive board positions in professionally-oriented clubs when there are so many other interesting uses of our time? Why does everyone seem to have their professional futures figured out, while I can’t go a week without contemplating dropping out and becoming an “influencer”?
It’s about the Odyssey’s Penelope and Odysseus: They’re vacationing for the Summer from the underworld, and instead of going home to Ithaca, Greece, they decide to visit Ithaca, New York. How quirky! They stay at Argos Inn in Room 214. On page 2, Penelope heads out to go work on her poems, which she does every day. “The fifteenth of August,” she thinks. “Our time here is almost done.”
This is not a call for endless restrictions on social life or acts of pandemic theater. I actually agree that any outdoor mask mandate is prioritizing the wrong thing given the miniscule risk for outdoor transmission compared to eating in a packed dining hall. Similarly, I acknowledge that most if not all of us are likely to get COVID-19 in our lifetime, experiencing it as a non-life-threatening illness somewhere between a cold we don’t notice and a bad case of the flu.
Let’s be honest, there’s somewhat of a stigma in being four semesters away from leaving Cornell and still being lost. Freshmen are allowed to wander — in fact, it’s encouraged as a positive sign of change. Juniors, on the other hand, are expected to have majors picked out, club leadership established and internships finalized. But perhaps growing older doesn’t always mean having the answers. Perhaps growing wiser means embracing those freshman-esque feelings rather than stifling them. Perhaps wanderlust should be encouraged at all ages.
If you choose to ignore the headphone request, walking to class lets you see how beautiful and gorgeous our home really is. Seeing people sled down the slope past you as you huff and puff up the Slope. Watching the line for Okenshields stretch outside of Willard Straight Hall. Sharing a wave and a smile with someone you think you know but you might not and oh well they’ve already passed me.
That sweaty August day marked the beginning of a most unprecedented freshmen year; a year full of Q-tip COVID tests, zoom classes, mask wearing and an unfettered hatred for the word unprecedented. New codes of conduct and behavioral contracts created what was deemed the “new normal” which fostered the creation of many new habits among the student body. For many students the walk to class no longer existed. Some replaced it by rolling out of bed, some by listening to class in bed, others by creating a walk of their own whether that be to their favorite study spot or to a building where the echoes of everyone’s zoom conversations bounced off the walls, an amalgamation of different subject matters that enlivened our senses.
Well, mainly the Pandemic. Although, unlike the situation in Jan. 2020, being in China right now means being in a place with one of the lowest number of cases on Earth. I even wrote a column then, hoping that this would not turn into a global pandemic. Trust me; as some of the few Chinese students who chose to spend this last year in the U.S. rather than return home, the differences couldn’t be less drastic. While I’m trying to gauge how bad a semester (turned out to be two) of zoom university was going to be back in Sept. 2020, my friends back home in China were already going to nightclubs with no fear.