Opinion

POGGI | On Being a Better Friend

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No one thinks they’re a bad friend. Few people tally events unattended or birthday texts missed on their part, yet we always notice when others fall short for us. In high school, being a good friend was relatively easy; you saw your friends throughout the day, in class or at practice, and rarely had to alter your schedule to carve out time spent together. School provided the infrastructure of friendship, and expectations of evenings at home absolve us of much planning save for weekends. This model doesn’t translate well to college, however, as I learned my freshman year.

Columns

CHASEN | Forgive Your Friends

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But oftentimes, there’s something that gets omitted from the Cornell experience, something that’s more important than all the rest. It’s the people — from the friends you meet during your first week to the longtime Ithaca residents you meet on campus and around town who have seen generations of Cornellians come and go. The people are what make the Cornell experience what it is. 

Why do I bring this up? Because sometimes the people around you will make you question this simple truth. This has been especially true in these last few years, where the pandemic has called into question many of the social customs we had all previously taken for granted.

class of 2021

GHAZI & YAMAZAKI | And Then They Were Roommates

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When you put a minimalist and a maximalist in a room together at 18 and tell them to make the arrangement work, it makes no sense that ours did. For four years, we inhabited two different Cornells, but we worked as roommates because we both wanted to create the same Cornell: a place where you can be both soft and strong, thriving and hurt, grounded in your being and terrified of your becoming.

Columns

SMITH | On Friendships, Cornell and Covid

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My mom’s favorite things to share about her college experience were all the memories she had of her friends. The late night study sessions, the dorm dynamics, the nights out, and sneaking extra coffee cake from the dining hall. So as I took my first steps on North Campus, I was filled with excitement and expectation thinking of the great friendships that awaited me. Similarly to high school, I was fed a narrative of college being the greatest time of my life, the place where I would make my forever friends and other rose-tinted statements that are simultaneously true and false. 

While I certainly talked to and gave a lot of people my phone number during O-Week, a lot of those numbers are sitting in my contacts like emails in my inbox from the club listservs I joined out of genuine interest but never ended up going to. Still, I’ve met many wonderful people that have been invaluable to me as pillars of support, cheerleaders, relationship coaches, comedians, study buddies and just proof that amazing human beings are out there.

Blogs

DAYS OF OUR LIVES | Chemistry

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In my first year of college, I made the misstep of taking class at the ungodly hour of 8:00 a.m. Against all advice, I, the beaming young student, was eager to tackle the demons of chemistry in the wee hours of the morning. The folly of my decision would soon become apparent through sleepless nights of composing reports and balancing equations, but for the moment I possessed an unrelenting determination to succeed. After successfully ignoring my alarm for a week, I soon understood that 8 a.m. was not as charming as I had thought, and I numbered the days until I would finally drop the course. On the last day, I decided out of respect for the teacher that I would brave the challenge of the early morning one final time. So I sat in the last row of seats, unsure of whether or not to take notes, feeling an awkward sense of premonition.