MEIDENBAUER | Major Decisions

After making it through pre-enroll, classes began without much fanfare.  Everything started off really fine.  Well, until the first prelims came around.  All of a sudden, I was working harder than ever before, determined to prove I was worthy of a Cornell Engineering degree.  I spent countless hours studying, talking with professors, agonizing over problem sets, all determined to reach the ultimate goal of what I thought was ‘success’.  But, I never took a second to question whether or not I was happy.

CHEN | A STEM Look Into the Opinion Section

I shouldn’t have worried about my reach or doubted the Daily Sun’s reach either. My team members for my Intro to Game Architecture course and fellow E-Board members for Women in Computing at Cornell loved resharing and boosting the links to my columns as soon as they came out. Even my ode to Duffield somehow reached my sister, who works in the Bay Area and has been out of school for five years, via her coworker. A junior from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln emailed me a four-paragraph response to my “Stop Catfishing Computer Science Majors” piece offering a separate angle from his personal experiences. My words were getting somewhere. Someone was reading. That was all that mattered.

CHEN | Stop Catfishing Computer Science Majors

While bugs in my code seemed impossible despite my line-by-line dissection, having a program finally run correctly would mitigate all the head-wracking hours that led up to the triumph. Every problem had its reason — if something wasn’t running correctly, you could pinpoint the exact line where values were being incorrectly set.

CHEN | A Letter To Duffield Atrium

After a quick morning Zoom class in my dorm room or a hefty dinner and bubble tea from Collegetown, I can typically be found climbing my way back to the engineering quadrangle and opening the partially transparent doors to the humble abode that has become my second home. I definitely am not alone — the simultaneous relief and motivation that sitting in Duffield gives me is a drug that hooks every engineer immediately after their first semester at Cornell. I will take this to my grave and to every life I am reborn into afterwards: If there was housing connected to Duffield, I would not hesitate to live there. 

The Duffield-Upson-Phillips conglomerate is clearly the shining star of the engineering quad. While the other surrounding buildings may be a classic brick and mortar structure, my second home glimmers in the sunlight in all of its silver glory. As the sun streams into the atrium, the students sitting there are refueled by probably their only source of vitamin D. The atrium’s floor-to-ceiling windows are not only stunning to look at but also completely functional for the wellbeing of all the struggling students inside. 

Within its walls, the various seating arrangements can also cater to almost any type of study session.

CHEN | Could AI Really Take Over the World?

The Artificial Intelligence of Hollywood has gotten everyone worried about a future run by robots. However, there are many aspects of our day-to-day interactions that AI is, as of yet, incapable of mirroring. Emotion, morality and personality are things not easily reduced to the positive and negative values of code. We’re safe for now.

BETTEZ | How to Work Smarter, Not Harder … From an Engineering Senior

My motivation is absolutely shot. I have absolutely no idea who that sophomore was who took four lab classes simultaneously one semester, but she absolutely wasn’t me. I suppose it’s a combination of COVID-19 making my classes all online as well as my senioritis, but I’m hardly the student I used to be. Instead of reviewing the week’s material in the A.D. White Library on a free Friday afternoon like I did as a freshman (haven’t done that since then), I curl up in my bed after every lecture I attend, exhausted. But thankfully, my grades haven’t slipped too much; I like to think that for every ounce of motivation I’ve lost, I’ve gained a little more savvy in how to work with efficiency.

CHEN | Put Computer Science in the Common Core

I could easily have gone through high school without writing a single line of code. 

The one computer science course I did take was selected on a whim, a simple space-filler for my senior year schedule. Science and math were enjoyable enough, and tech seemed like the next unexplored realm. But I was also on the edge of taking a random biotechnology elective, zoology class or just leaving the space free to take extra naps. There was little to no initiative — or requirement — to learn about computing other than the fact that I found phone apps addictive and played around with Scratch when I was a kid. AP Computer Science had the same weight as my elective journalism or strings classes, not AP Chemistry or AP Language and Composition.