Cutthroat? hah. good one.

ZFanatic
Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:22:21 +0000

So I’ve heard from everything that Cornell is such a cutthroat place, where no one wants to help other people and everyone wants to beat the next guy.

Not true.

I spent the weekend there with the diversity program in engineering, and the environment was the farthest thing from that. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very competitive, but it’s not the competitive that people want to beat you, it’s a competitiveness that makes them all want to do better. I walked thorugh dorms and saw tons of people in study groups helping eachother. The guy i stayed with said that if you really wanted to, you could finish a problem set without ever doing a problem, because people are willing to share. Heck, his friend that is a year older than him, gave him all of his Computer Programming hw, so he could make straight A’s in the class without doing anything. One of the other guys I talked with was having trouble with his spanish homework, so he called a friend and they came over and helped him with it.

Cutthroat? psh. Competitive? Very much though. They do work very hard. Very very hard, but I never once felt like the kids were out to get eachother. Everyone there is realy friendly as well. I, being a pre-frosh, thought I would kind of be ignored by older kids, but my host introduced me to tons of people and they were all super nice.

I originally was hesitant to even apply to Cornell. now, it’s one of my top choices. Don’t be afraid of the environment. it will challenge you, it will kick your butt, but it seems like in the end those are the kids who don’t crumble later in life when things don’t go perfect all the time.

And if you want partying… You don’t have to worry at all. haha.