The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/hobby/)
The Chopin Fantasie-Impromptu I recently started working on may never see the light of day. It certainly won’t be performed in Ford Hall in front of sixty-some fidgeting children and marginally-less-fidgeting parents. I’m more than okay with that. Maybe, I’ll play it for friends if we’re near a keyboard, and maybe I won’t. The key to my newfound enjoyment of playing, I’ve found, is that the only applause I care about now is my own.
How does speedrunning Cuphead tie into résumé building? The point of all experiences for creating your résumé is not the prestige or name-recognition of your most recent internship. Rather, the goal is to show transferable skills from your past involvements to your prospective ones.
Our campus culture is in a quirkiness crisis, and it largely stems from the fact that many of our students are in a hobby crisis: At a school where we are so trained to map out our academics and careers, we lose the ability to set, and take seriously, non-academic goals.
At home, everyone has their go-to hair stylist, barber, manicurist, etc. Yet, when students come to Cornell, they lose their favorite hometown beauty specialists, and have to find new people. That is where self-taught, enterprising students like Alayna Earl ’23 come in. “Three years ago I watched a YouTube video on [eyebrow] threading,” said Earl. “I would practice on my friends and sometimes they would give me money.
Being happy isn’t something that others can do for you; it’s something that you need to find for yourself. Sometimes, or maybe too often, happiness is a battle. People have always described me as a bubbly and positive person. I excel at helping others and trying to put a smile on their faces to brighten their days. I’m that person that smiles at strangers on the street.