Columns

CHOUNG | All Majors Are Hard

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Bombing a prelim seems so easy to say and accept, but once you’re in that situation, it can feel like the end of the world, especially to students who are ambitious and high achievers. It feels harder for me to accept this reality because I caged myself in the notion that I shouldn’t find any of my classes difficult, especially because I am in a humanities-based major. As a student studying Policy Analysis and Management, I’ve always compared my workload to my pre-medical or engineering friends and discredited my own struggles. Every time I catch myself feeling down about the amount of work I have to do, I scold myself for thinking my classes are difficult when my friends have it worse than me. I’ve only just come to the realization that I need to show myself grace and acknowledge that I may find my major difficult. This doesn’t discount my intelligence or efforts, but is just another demonstration of how academically rigorous Cornell is. 

Saying that you failed a prelim can be numbing, especially with the prevalent prelim culture here on campus. I seem to hear this phrase every week, especially from students in more academically demanding majors, such as engineering or pre-med students. It almost seems to be a rite of passage and a sense of pride for Cornell students — you are not officially one of us until you’ve felt the pressures of academic success looming over you. Your struggles feel heard if everyone collectively agrees that a prelim was hard, and you feel especially validated when you are in a more traditionally difficult major. However, as many know, Cornell also offers many non-traditional majors.

Columns

DO | Humanities on a Deserted Island

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To make this more personal to Cornell students, let’s consider this game in terms of college majors instead of careers: which majors would you want to start a new civilization with? Right off the bat, majors from all of Human Ecology, Dyson, Hotel, ILR and most of Arts & Sciences can all be nixed entirely, save for maybe Nutritional Science in Human Ecology. CALS and Engineering are where we find the most bang for our buck, with such majors as Food Science, Animal Science, Mechanical Engineering and Environmental Engineering having obvious utility.

Columns

POGGI | I Wish I Knew my Professors Better

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Cornell’s student-instructor culture is vastly different, however, especially in the large departments and STEM classes. With the large (and growing) student population, there just aren’t enough faculty to facilitate meaningful relationships in classes unless the subject is niche and the class is small. Moreover, while Ithaca isn’t New York City, the city is large enough that there isn’t the small-town phenomenon of bumping into professors out and about.

Columns

CHEN | A STEM Look Into the Opinion Section

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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.

wall of wonder

Student-Published Book Celebrates Cornell Female Leaders in STEM

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Forbes’ 2019 America’s Most Innovative Leaders named only one woman on the entire 100-person list. Cornell’s Society of Women Engineers saw this lack of representation as an opportunity to showcase female leaders in STEM within the Cornell community. The result was Wall of Wonder: Cornell Women Leading the Way in Science, Technology, and Engineering, a book of short biographies of 27 inspiring alumnae, written by SWE co-presidents Madeline Dubelier ’20 and Catherine Gurecky ’20, alongside member Abigail Macaluso ’20. The three also worked with David Ross Jansen ’22, a performing and media arts student who illustrated portraits of each of the women. Proceeds from the book will go to K-12 outreach programs organized by the Cornell SWE chapter.