I know very little about the school and my child was admitted. No visit yet and I’m trying to get a sense of what it is like for freshmen, if you compare the experience to Carleton College and University of Rochester, two other options. Main field of interest: computer science. Main area of interest: research.
Thanks!
Cornell is hands down the best for computer science (in the list you provided). With the new Gates hall dedicated to CS, Cornell is basically considered the “Silicon Ivy”. You can check out the post-graduate reports for CS to see what kids end up doing afterwards. http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services/students/statistics/postgrad_reports.cfm
Personally, as a freshman I feel like meeting people at a private school would be easier since it is usually not filled with freshmen who knew each other from HS.
Engineering students are usually pretty diverse. They tend be hard-working and spend a lot of time in the engineering buildings for work and for socializing. Having said that, they come from lots of social circles…so everyone can find a place to fit in. There’s a lot of people who are geared towards the industry track and there are a ton of opportunities with career fairs, info sessions and recruiting events happening all the time (with the top companies - i.e. Google). There is also a great faculty doing cutting edge research and a ton of resources for those who are interested in entrepreneurship. No matter what your child’s interest, they will find something to their liking.
I will point out that Cornell may be more competitive than the other two, and has a very rigorous workload. If your child can handle it, Cornell will do wonders for them.
Cornell is a very large university. I used to cal it a Big Red Machine. The students are treated like adults, meaning they have to advocate for themselves. No professor or dean will call if your kid should miss classes, like at some small LACs. Some classes are large, but students can get 1:1 by going to office hours.
Both of my kids (students of A&S) said their professors were approachable and reasonable. My older kid was very sick freshman year. All of her professors gave her extensions on her papers/prelims. My younger kid was overwhelmed with work right before her spring break and was given 24 hr extension on her paper. Both kids, one STEM and one humanities student, got their summer internships through Cornell. The older one got her full time job through on campus recruiting.
I like hiring Cornell students because of their can do attitude. They tend to be down to earth, hard working, smart, and fun loving - very much of work hard and play hard mentality.
My older one, 5 years out of Cornell, still treasures her 4 years at Cornell, and the younger one is already talking about how much she is going to miss the place when she graduates.
Happiest as a student would be a very smart kid with- most important- really good study/work habits. Not necessarily brought there beforehand, could be developed there. But to be happiest they must exist.
Happiest as a person there is not one answer really. There are lots of “types” of people at Cornell, people tend to find their own groups. A multi-college university is different than an LAC in this aspect.
Let’s talk about some non-academic stuff.
Freshmen at Cornell live in a large dorm neighborhood reserved entirely for them, which includes some of the nicest dorms on campus – as well as lots of special programming for freshmen and two huge dining halls with an amazing variety of food. Students from the different schools are mixed, so your computer jock will be living with people who plan to major in subjects as diverse as classics and hotel administration.
Except for one large dorm that was endowed as housing for women and must be used for that purpose until it crumbles into the ground, all the dorms are co-ed.
Odd as it may seem, incoming freshmen who want singles have a very good chance of getting them. The dorms now reserved for freshmen used to be upperclass dorms, and they have a lot of singles.
On-campus housing at Cornell is guaranteed for only two years, so your kid will almost certainly live off-campus at some point, probably with a bunch of friends (perhaps of both sexes) in a large apartment or rented house. Students who live off-campus are still very actively involved in the university, but they do have to deal with things like leases and landlords and roommates who want to move out unexpectedly and plumbing that gets stopped up in the middle of the night. (Personally, I consider this a plus. It makes moving into an apartment after graduation less of a shock. But some people disagree.) Off-campus apartments for the following academic year are rented very early. When your kid says that he/she has to sign a lease before Thanksgiving for an apartment for the next year, believe it.
Incoming students have to take a swim test. If you flunk, you have to take swimming for PE. If you pass, you can take cooler things for PE like yoga or bowling. (My daughter got her bowling average up to 150.) You only have to take a year of PE, and most people don’t mind it.
Cornell has a large Greek presence, but there are also thousands of people who have no interest whatsoever in fraternities and sororities, so if your kid doesn’t want to join a Greek house, that’s fine, too.
On-campus job recruiting is amazingly good, considering Cornell’s inconvenient location, especially for people in practical majors like computer science (or even slightly less practical majors – my daughter, an economics major, got an excellent job through on-campus recruiting at the height of the recession).
Except for people in the really little schools (hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and architecture), students may find Cornell to be a bit impersonal. Advice and opportunities won’t come looking for you; you have to go look for them. But once you do, you’ll find that almost anything you might ever want is there at Cornell. But it’s up to you to seek it out.
There is another distinguishing feature resulting from students living off campus. Those houses and apartments are not owned by the university. There are no RAs, eg. For many upperclassmen social life revolves around going out with people and friends in their house(s), going to house parties thrown by others, or just hanging out with a bunch of people in someone’s apartment .
This was a feature D2 found very significant when she decided to transfer to Cornell. Where she attended previously, everyone lived in university-owned housing for all four years. No parties were allowed there, and there was limited space for people to just hang out. She much preferred the social environment that the housing situation at Cornell fostered.
Computer science is one of Cornell’s most difficult majors; however, there are many students in CS and they help each other out. Also, there are a lot of great opportunities for startups at the school too. As far as research goes, Cornell has got to be very close to the top.
The fact that your child was accepted to the CS major means that Cornell thinks your child can succeed. Visit for Cornell Days and get a flavor for the school!
For monydad’s daughter and mine, the off-campus living situation monydad described so accurately was a big plus.
But I can see why it might ring alarm bells in some people’s minds. For example, my daughter was at Cornell and living off-campus at the time of the H1N1 flu epidemic. Cornell set up lots of supports for underclassmen living in the dorms (for example, delivery of meals and health-care supplies to sick students), but almost none of these supports were available to students living off-campus.
I asked my daughter about this and had my ear chewed off in response. Evidently, she and her two apartment-mates had discussed the situation thoroughly and figured out exactly how they would cope if all three of them got sick simultaneously. (As it happened, none of them got sick at all.)
Cornell seems to work out best for independent types like my daughter and her apartment-mates. People who prefer to have their hands held – whether during course selection or a disease outbreak – might be happier elsewhere.
Hopefully we’re sending them there expecting (or hoping) that they will grow up.
The apartment situation only helps with that, IMO, and most upperclasssmen like it better too.
I still remember calling my mother late one evening. from my apartment, asking her how to make a hamburger. I had this package of chopped meat, but I didn’t know what to do with it.
Good thing to know…
It’s actually a good transition, because much of the housing is close or adjacent to campus and the landlords are all accustomed to renting to students.
One thing I loved about Cornell when I was there (a long time ago, but I think it still applies) is that you can find every type of person. There is no one “type.” You have your jocks, nerds, geeks, fashionistas, crunchies, artsies, gay, straight, feminists, traditionalists, conservatives, liberals, and every possible ethnicity.
@brantly Oh, yes.
It was a long time ago for me, too (I’m a Cornell graduate as well as the parent of a Cornell graduate), but my first roommate was the daughter of the provost of another university – quite a contrast from my background, as the first person in a blue-collar family who ever went to college.
And down the hall, a flat-broke street-smart Jewish girl from the Bronx High School of Science was rooming with a Southern debutante who had always gone to expensive and exclusive boarding schools, and neither of them had ever met anyone even remotely like the other one before.
There were people who were thrilled to be in ROTC and people who were horrified by the existence of ROTC.
There were people who had no idea what they were going to do with their lives and those who had already committed themselves to careers in fields as specialized as Landscape Architecture or Hotel Administration.
And we were all thrown in together. It was great!
That post was fantastic @Marian. It actually made me smile.
Really well written and makes me want to go to Cornell that much more.
@Marian, yes, exactly the reason for going to such a great and diverse school! This is what my D is looking forward to most.
Thanks so much! My son actually applied to the College of Arts and Sciences because he may want to double major in a natural science as well as computer science. Does that make a difference in terms or recruiters and post-grad opportunities in this field? He told me that he can get a BS from either the A&S or Engineering. i am just not familiar enough with the field to know how to guide him. Thanks!
Arts and Sciences only offers a BA and not a BS. From what I hear, that makes no difference in regards to post-grad opportunities, but it definitely upsets some people within Arts and Sciences who are pursuing a science field but will end up with a BA.
Thank you! Do you think it matters if a CS major gets a BA from Arts and Sciences instead of a BS from Engineering in terms of jobs and graduate school options? My son applied to Arts and Sciences.
Thanks Ranza123! Would like to see if others agree about this BA/BS question.
My opinion on it (coming from a student in Arts and Sciences who is more humanities-oriented than science) is that having a BA in computer science makes a candidate seem well-rounded. I’ve been reading a bunch of articles recently stating that nowadays employers are looking for science majors with a liberal arts background, which A&S would provide. Your son would be taking the same CS courses as an engineering student, so he would have all the same CS knowledge as someone coming from an engineering school, but he would also have to take a few classes in other disciplines (cultural analyis, literature, historical breadth, etc.) which may or may not ever translate into his future profession (I personally think writing courses are always helpful) but would at the very least show that he is intellectually well-rounded.
“…it definitely upsets some people within Arts and Sciences who are pursuing a science field but will end up with a BA.”
I don’t recall that sentiment expressed during my time there. A BA degree from Cornell in a science-related field was considered a good thing.