GUEST ROOM | The Big Red Organization

Now that the world’s gone nuts, quarantine has led us all to confront problems we’ve been putting off for far too long. Loveless marriages, dislike of children and a lot of tequila are driving Americans over the edge. Since we’ve all had to deal with our own issues, I figured Cornell should do the same. The university’s undergraduate college structure doesn’t make a ton of sense. Why are there three business schools?

BETTEZ | What’s in a Freshman GPA?

The Cornell Engineering administration is under no illusion that first semester freshmen are under a large amount of stress and pressure. Thrown from all corners of the world into a notoriously difficult University environment, there are bound to be growing pains as they acclimate to their new lives. The administration provides them a large number of supplementary Academic Excellence Workshop classes, bar them from joining the competitive and time sinking project teams as fully fledged members and flood them with resources and opportunities to find their home and people on the vast campus. But despite precedent from other leading engineering schools, they’ve failed to eliminate the single greatest stressor to these bright-eyed freshmen: Their grades. By switching the first semester grading scheme to a S/U system, we can create a more equitable environment for students to acclimate to their new lives.

BETTEZ | Forget the Public Policy School, Give Us a Design School

Here’s a scenario that has totally never happened to me before: you’ve had a long day of classes and you’re ready to finally head home to your apartment in Collegetown, when you find yourself pulling on a push door as you exit, say, Upson Hall. You feel like an idiot; you’re a junior and here you are, looking like a prospective student visiting campus for the first time. But what if I told you that’s not your fault? That, instead, you’ve fallen prey to one of the most common design errors: the Norman door. First coined in the 1988 novel The Design of Everyday Things, the Norman Door is the result of poor and conflicting design decisions that make it difficult to determine how to operate the door, often resulting in a reliance on signage, or allowing its users to feel like idiots every day.

BETTEZ | The Quiet Classism in Engineering

As the add/drop period continues and students consider the classes they’ll dedicate their time and energy toward, an element to class selection weighs more heavily on some more than others: the hidden costs that are barriers to taking the classes. Classism is inextricable from the American collegiate system, for which there is little Cornell’s College of Engineering can do to dispel. But for the changes it is capable of, Cornell can do better to ensure that all students are capable of taking all classes within the College regardless of their background. Any student who earns a spot in the engineering school should be capable of taking any of its classes. The Ivy League university we attend surrounds us with such unusual wealth that it’s easy for the professors and administrators to forget that the perceived minor expenses of their classes aren’t just making an insignificant dent in the pocket of a Canada Goose or Supreme jacket.