The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/compet/)
If you ever want to realize some of your greatest capacities, work for a student newspaper. Here, you’ll solve crises and uncover opportunities and see how much you can accomplish, even on the least amount of sleep.
Twenty years old and retired — that’s the dream. For the 137th Editorial Board of The Cornell Daily Sun, this will become our reality as we step back from checking Slack and our emails every 30 seconds to give a new set of editors the chance to make The Sun shine. During the process The Sun so fondly knows as compet, these editors-to-be will step up to the plate and take on the late nights, take out the Oxford commas and work toward being elected into an editorship on the 138th Editorial Board. Though it will be a very stark change of pace for those of us on the 137th Editorial Board, we will take a step back, to allow these editors the chance to learn and grow. Come March, they lead The Sun into a new year with their names glowing brightly on the masthead that has held its former editors’ names since 1880.
Cornellians have a thing for pretentious names. We call our midterms “prelims,” our hills “slopes,” and our everything bagels “Long Island.” When it comes to stupid names, we at The Cornell Daily Sun are no better — and I’m not just talking about those times when design editor Emma Williams ’19 would sarcastically call me “Supreme Leader” in her emails. No, the pretentious name to which we are most attached is “compet.”
What is compet? The exact etymology is, like too much at Cornell, shrouded in mystery, but if you look closely, you’ll notice it bears a striking resemblance to the word “compete” with the second “e” lopped off. Coincidentally, compet is the time during which staffers at The Sun compete against each other for editorships.