YAO | Saying Goodbye to ‘Hello Katie’

I’ve been accumulating ideas for this final column since freshman year. Amorphous thoughts stored in the back of my mind, half-baked phrases in the notes app on my phone, 3 a.m. text message wisdom to friends. Yet now, when I have to transform my jumbled miscellanea into coherent sentences, nothing I can write feels adequate. After all, how do you consolidate four years, one pandemic, a million existential crises and a billion more memories into a cohesive narrative? 

The Things I Carried

As a senior soon to graduate, I have been reflecting on how much I have grown since matriculating at Cornell. I believe my undergraduate experience can be best summarized with the quotation, “I don’t know if it was heaven or hell, but whatever it was, it was wonderful.” I, like many students, have excelled and failed, found love and lost it, matured, evolved my cognitive processes, better understood myself, and have grown even more handsome (not like many students). Positivity does not sell, though – just look at Ithaca’s own Positive News — it’s free and no one reads it. For that reason, my editor encouraged me to reflect on some of the past four years’ hell.