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SPARACIO | The Second First Day

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All I can do is stare at my reflection, boxed within two pairs of bisecting parallel lines and four right angles; nothing feels right, and I’m paralyzed once again by my rectangular composition. By now, we all know what it feels like to stare into the pixelated abyss that is Zoom. Even the word “Zoom” seems to trail off into the distance, attempting to bridge our distant worlds, but lengthening the divide instead. 

Zoom creates a world of its own filled with Zoom “norms.” The silent breakout room. The impossibility of eye contact. Turning the camera on.

Columns

KEMPFF | Protect Rush Week

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The air was electric. It was the dead of winter in 2020, and thousands of anxious underclassmen filled Ithaca a week ahead of their peers. These people left their likely more sunny homes to come to the snowy white campus for a decades-long rite of passage: rush week. 

Rush week, an annual event for fraternity and sorority recruitment, is under threat. This will mark the second year with effectively no rush week. Instead  — under the cloud of COVID-19 — rush week has been pushed from its early spot to the first week of classes.

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SMITH | In Defense of the Cornell Testing Program

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However, Samilow and I differ on our feelings about the University’s actions to control COVID on campus. I believe he fails to recognize — as this pandemic has taught us — that our own comfortability doesn’t always match the comfortability of others. I’m still nervous in the aftermath of the end of last semester. It didn’t feel like a turning point for me. It just felt like another chapter in this exhausting saga.

Columns

AGGARWAL | A “Final” Consideration for Final Exams

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The eventuality of alert level red seemed impossible to me — I  figured that the highest alert level was merely a drastic measure that we would never actually have to use. Last semester especially, with vaccinations widely available and the recent arrival of booster shots, I had not honestly given consideration to anything but in-person final exams, seeing as the entire instructional semester maintained in-person activities successfully. When the time came, though, I knew Cornell would sound the red alert alarms before the University’s COVID tracking dashboard even reported the case numbers. In a matter of a few days, an alarming percentage of my close friends were either confirmed positive for COVID or had been told they were in recent contact with someone who had contracted the virus. 

It wasn’t hard to extrapolate how the spread had happened — in the traditional rush to jam end-of-semester celebrations in before finals, there was an evident assumption that we would be okay and well within the range of cases that would allow us to end the semester normally. Well, a new, drastically more contagious variant of the virus had other thoughts.