Cornell History Major

That the Cornell campus is full of bridges that Cornell students all use to kill themselves.

Sort of. There are bridges. And once in a while, someone will jump off of one.

In general, there is a guarantee of 1-2 suicides each school year. One year I remember thinking, "you know, it's spring, and no one's killed themselves." There were two suicides in the next two weeks.

But, the official party line is that Cornell is actually slightly BELOW the national average for college student suicide. I have never personally investigated the statistics.

Needless to say, if you kill yourself, you have bigger problems than "the bars don't stay open late enough," so I tend not to blame the suicides on the school. As for blaming suicides on the weather: if you're that cold, then buy a jacket, for God's sake. It's much less messy and you don't have to write a note first.

Cornell is an excellent school with an excellent reputation. When I tell people I went there, the most common reaction is, "ooh -- Cornell." A close second is, "ooh -- look at you!" When I was there, no one gave a damn about any sport other than hockey, and those games are fun. Not that there aren't other sports that are good, it was just that nobody cared. Although we finally made the NCAA basketball tournament, and I went to the game in Anaheim -- go school! We lost that game, really, really badly. It was kind of hard to watch. Still, cool to be there.

I enjoyed my time at Cornell, but it has a well-earned reputation as an academically rigorous school and it works hard to protect that reputation. The school admits hard workers and expects them to work hard. There are slacker majors, mostly in the publicly funded colleges (Industrial and Labor Relations, Human Ecology, Agriculture and Life Sciences, etc.), but even in the largest college, Arts and Sciences, a savvy lay-about can find a way to get by without doing an uncomfortable amount of work. I was a history and government double major, and generally didn't feel too overwrought until about three weeks before finals, when it was time to start digging on the floor for the syllabus. Of course, I had friends who were engineers and architechts, and those kids were always under the gun. Although I always said: engineers bring it on themselves.

The most important thing to know about the academics at any college is that you will get out of it what you put into it. At a school like Cornell, there are nerds, stoners, hicks, rich kids, and (oh my god) about 79 a capella choirs. The size of the school dilutes competitveness, so I never felt that to be an issue (other than thinking, "damn -- that kid who always sits up front and never shuts up is gonna get an A"). Professors are like anyone else -- if you want to be friends with them, go to office hours and make friends. Many of them are geniuses and fascinating people and can write you recommendations for things you have never yet contemplated, like externships or, God forbid, law school.

I should also mention the Hotel Administration School, which is reputed to be one of the best hospitality schools in the world, but functions in reality as a sort of campus country club. Hotel kids do the least work and get the most benefits. They generally come from wealthy families (if there's a kid in your Hotel class named Marriott, then guess what? It is THAT Marriott) and they arrive on campus as a natural aristocracy. These are the kids who will be the best connected in the frats and know about concerts and events around town. Fancy cars, fancy booze, fancy parties -- call your friend the Hotelie and find out what's up. They also get by far the least amount of homework. There was an urban legend about a couple of engineers who transferred to the Hotel school in their Sophmore year and within one semester had caught up on three semesters of Hotel school requirements. A case in point is "donuts," a freshman requirement for Hotelies that entails wearing a suit to a lecture once a week (albeit Friday morning -- nothing like a hungover teenager trying to tie a necktie while running down the sidewalk), sitting through a lecture, and eating donuts (thus the name). Also, there was a class on handshakes (firm grip, one pump, smile, eye contact, good job!). Ultimately, the Hotel school is more about making connections than anything else, and in that sense, is a sort of undergrad business school. And because the Hotel school is so highly touted, Hotelies visiting restaurants and hotels can usually finagle free stuff from managers who might want to recruit them later -- pretty sweet.

So, at the risk of sounding like a brochure, the school's motto is "an instiution where any can receive instruction in any subject" (or something like that) and that's the school's real advantage, because it's true. I switched from a biology major to a double major in history and government and got a great education in all three.

Cornell, because of its size and its partial public funding, attracts a broader swath of people than most other schools, certainly than other Ivy League schools. We had rich kids in the Hotel School. We had country-folk in the Agriculture and Life Sciences school. And we had every geographic and socio-economic level in between. The school worked very hard to build a racially diverse student body, but ended up, like most Ivy League schools, with a disproportionate number of Asians and Jews (and a disproportionate number of the jews were from Long Island, which was very annoying for those of us who were Jewish and didn't like being accused of being from Long Island). Also, the school was only 10% African-American, much to the dismay of the African American students.

There were some racial incidents while I was on campus. I think someone burned a cross on the lawn of the Native American themed living center. I vaguely remember a newspaper story about someone shouting racial slurs from their dormatory window. Much like American society at large, we at Cornell didn't know what to do about it, other than to all agree that racism is bad. You'll find racists anywhere, in any population over a given size; it's the law of averages. Cornell is, by and large, a typically pluralistic and open-minded college campus.

Politically, there is some activity. I was there when the Iraq war started, and there was a 70 foot long "no blood for oil" banner hung outside one of the larger class buildings. Also, the leftist-activist kids would protest against corporations that were on campus or global warming or (to their credit) living wages for campus workers. That generally involved sitting in front of the administration building, playing guitar and occasionally talking to a local news camera. There was a small but vocal campus conservative contingent. I remember once seeing a pasty blonde kid in a green jacket and an American flag neck tie standing in front of a 20 foot American flag outside the student union, railing about the "silent majority" and extolling the virtues of Ronald Regan and George Bush. The Cornell Sun ran a number of political columns that dealt with campus and real-world political issues; I wrote one of those.

In general, it's a left-leaning campus of the yankee-liberal-intellectual genus, the kind of place that would have confirmed all of Nixon's worst fears.

The greek system dominates the social scene, to the detriment of those who do not join it. I spent freshman year going to frat parties, like most everyone, but wanted nothing to do with the greek system when it came time to rush. Bars close at 1 AM (or did while I was in school) and were also dominated by the greek system. House parties in collegetown are house parties; they're as cool as the people who show up. If you have cool friends you'll have cool house parties to go to. Each year on the last day of classes is slope day, when all the students skip class to sit on the big slope on campus, drink, smoke, and hang out. Although by the time I graduated they had neutered it into a quasi-high school dance with ID and bag checks, fences, guards, and entrances. Not like the good old days, but still fun. Also, Dragon Day is an annual tradition where the architecture students build a giant dragon, parade it around campus, and then burn it. Why? "Why" is not a question that architects bother with very much outside the classroom. Also, the engineers would build a phoenix and attempt to rival the dragon on the parade, or destroy the dragon before the parade finished. Also, no reason given. A number of violent incidents (engineers versus architechts -- glasses everywhere!)led the administration to also bring this one under control by involving Ithaca's finest in the parade plans. Despite sounding really, really stupid, the architechture school is one of the best in the world so the dragon is usually flat out sick.

I'll do a survey of drugs on campus since I doubt anyone else will. First, alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. While I was there, the administration started passing out "zero-to-three" paraphenalia, zero-to-three being the average number of drinks consumed by a Cornell student while drinking, according to surveys. The program included really cool free mini frisbees, which my friends and I used for a long time. Of course, statistics can be tricky things (if each year, you make $1,000,000 and your roommate makes $0, you have an average household income of $500,000). Drinking pretty much breaks down the way you'd expect: nerds don't stop studying to drink, greek system kids don't stop drinking ever, and everyone else falls somewhere in between. Choose your friends to suit however much drinking you like to do, and you'll be fine. Unless you end up in one of these Darwin awards stories like the idiot my freshman year who got so drunk he fell out of a third floor window and broke his leg. AND, the window only opened from the bottom so you couldn't fall out of it! Dunce.

One thing you will learn at Cornell, as I did, that there are different kinds of smart, and even if someone is good at math, they still might be a complete ass outside the classroom.

Next: weed. Naturally, the climate is authentically cold (in February, anything over 20 degrees is a nice day), and some nights there's just not a good enough reason to venture out, and sitting around an apartment watching DVD's leads inevitably to marijuana. Which leads inevitably to DP Dough (if you don't know, ask somebody). As with booze, suit the friends you make to the amount of this you want to do.

Now we get into the real fancy stuff: cocaine and ecstacy. Cocaine is not my thing, but I had friends who used it occasionally. The wealthier frats had plenty of it around although it was usually a hushed up operation, either because they didn't want to get caught or because they didn't want to share; probably both. Ecstacy was around, of course, but you had to hunt for it; generally a good place to start was down at Theta-Delta (aka Theta-Delt, aka Theta-Drug), but that's five year old intelligence, so who knows? Maybe that house is all country clubbers now.

Halucinagenics -- LSD and Mushrooms -- were around, too, if you moved in the right circles. There was a campus hip-hop group I really liked and I remember seeing one of their shows when a friend told me that the DJ was tripping acid for the first time; he was performing pretty well, all things considered. I also remember there was one really bright student who was into mushrooms and once parked her car in the middle of campus and ran two miles back to her house in collegetown, naked. Later that year, she was tripping mushrooms and fell over a railing, plunging five floors to her instant death. The Hotel school is only a couple hundred kids, and everyone knew her; the loss was very traumatic.

Drugs are dangerous. But, so is getting out of bed. All of this is about who you make friends with. No one is going to foist drugs on you and if you don't want it you really can do like Nancy Regan says and Just Say No. Make your own decisions.

I've attended college or law school at Cornell, Sydney University, the University of International Relations in Beijing, the University of Arizona, and UCLA. My advice is to go somewhere warm, where the academics are good but not a stress-test, and the sports are good.

I had incredible philosophy and political science classes at Cornell that permanently changed the way I view the world, but if I had it to do over, I wouldn't have spent four years in the bottomless snow drifts of Ithaca, NY.