Cornell Blog: An unofficial blog about Cornell University

A massive 472 page project, the Cornellian 2006:  Expect delivers a healthy dose of nostalgia, photography, fun, and academics.  Yet, with over 40 pages of advertising, occasional pixilation, layout inconsistency, and typographical errors, the yearbook mars an A grade production with sporadic lack of attention to detail.  While a street price of $90 USD might also dissuade young, graduating Cornellians to purchase their yearbook, in spite of its shortcomings, I give it my strong endorsement.

The last four years of your life at Cornell are recorded in high-resolution images, both colour and black and white.  Your classmates are reproduced by name and portrait in the back of the Cornellian.  Main aspects of life at Cornell University—Bear Access, Freshman Orientation, Buildings, Majors, Locations—are represented in prose as well as photography.  In short, when you read over the Cornellian 2006 four years later, or at a reunion, its images will bring back the memories of these four years that you cannot afford to forget.

You did not attend Cornell to nail an ivy-league 4.0 and diploma or a well salaried job.  You came here to teach your entire person what it means to be a magnanimous adult.  Your friendships, love affairs, parties, and late night study sessions will be the most valuable memories, and the Cornellian may provide the key to unlock them in the years to come.

Except for campus housing’s tendency to impose totalitarian and arbitrary pseudo-policies, demands, and threats, my housing at Cornell on campus has been great, and off campus, ok.  Let me tell the good stuff first.

I lived on North in Low Rise 8, also known as the  Holland International Living Center (HILC) for my first two years.  It was filled with all kinds of international kids, and organized into a fun suite structure in which a half-dozen rooms were clustered around bathrooms and connected to other suites by hallways.  The events at HILC were great—there were always people doing something there.

However, with 2 doubles and 2 singles per sweet, I ended up with roommates both times.  And, it’s not easy to live with a roommate, now matter how nice they are.  Eventually, they start to get on your nerves, or else communicate some kind of disease you never recover from.  My first roommate, for example, had a huge Asian fetish, which I temporarily adopted to tease him with whose desktop wallpaper could be hotter.  I won; tt hasn’t worn off.

Then afterwards, in my senior year, I lived a quietly defiant life in Cascadilla Hall, where I enjoyed a single.  It was peaceful, except when a missive came down from my RHD that I didn’t like.  Friends were in the building, and it was close to campus.  Food was available in ctown.  In short, it was everything I wanted.

However, in my Junior year, I tried living the collegetown life.  It was a failure.  While I rented a studio sublet for $600 a month, utilities, internet, and other living costs could have easily brought that number up over $1000 per month.  At those prices, I wasn’t saving money against living in the dorms anymore, and the hassle of finding housing in Ithaca’s collegetown is generally not worth it.

I’m a Computer Science major in the College of Arts and Sciences.  We have the same CS curriculum as the engineers do, save different prerequisites.  I, for example, had to master a language, and take social and arts courses to augment my CS studies.  We all had to pass the infamous “swim test,” which is really like throwing ping-pong balls into water to see if they float or not, and take at least two semesters of pass-fail Physical Education.

If you ask an Engineer, the Arts CS students are weaklings who chose an easier path.  If you ask the Arts students, Engineers are fearless nerds with no appreciation for formal structure.  There’s little actual rivalry, and more talk than anything.  Personally, I appreciated the ability to take non-engineering courses to round my personality as opposed to the more rigid engineering core requirements.  From 32 classes, the CS undergraduate degree requires four in introductory programming and data structures, two in machine architecture, four in computer science theory and math, and four of your own choice, in addition to the four calculus and linear algebra math courses required.  That’s more than half of coursework there, tied into the major by sheer requirement.