Into Cornell... What Next?

norcalguy
Sat, 22 Dec 2007 20:27:46 +0000

I think the most important thing is to find a good balance between academics and social life. Most freshman fall into the two ends of the spectrum. They either party too much or they study too much.

As a freshman, I never set foot inside a library…literally. I had no idea what Uris or Olin or any of the other libraries looked like at the end of my freshman year. I studied 1 day max for prelims and sometimes even on the morning of prelim day. I remember trying to teach myself Greens, Stokes, and Divergence Theorems for multivar calc on the morning of my prelim. I had stopped going to class and had NO IDEA what was going on. And I lived in Donlon, not an easy place to study.

I lived in a 4-person suite and we had alcohol in the dorm at all times. We had two piles in the common room: beer cans and Starbucks Doubleshot cans cuz that’s all we drank as freshmen. One of my floormates at Donlon had a freakin’ wine rack in his room and ordered a case of wine from wine.com and had it sent through RPU. God, we were stupid. My suitemates and I came close to being JAed many times. Luckily, our RA was chill but she warned us that she’d have to write us up if she ever found those beer cans full.

Luckily, I didn’t join Facebook until midway through my junior year or else that would’ve been another distraction. In retrospect, there is not a week that goes by where I don’t thank God for how lucky I was and how I could’ve easily ****ed away my future in those first two years of college. My semester GPA dropped precipitously from a 3.9 to a 3.7 to a 3.5 but that could’ve easily been a 2.9 to 2.7 to 2.5. I had multiple friends who ended up on academic probation. I got my act together, averaged over a 4.0 in my last 5 semesters, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and now I’ll be going to medical school. But, in those early years, my dreams were hanging on by a thread.

So, I would encourage all freshmen to explore Cornell and all college has to offer (including parties). But, be responsible, find a balance, don’t go overboard. Not everyone is as fortunate as I was.