Author: Claire Baum
Cornell Days is here.
You know what that means: tons of pre-freshmen touring our campus and sampling the life of a Cornellian. Cornell Days is the largest yield program in the Ivy League. This year the event plans to attract around 5,000 prospective students to our Ithaca campus. It’s hard for many of us, especially upperclassmen, to remember that we once stood in their shoes. As a volunteer for Cornell Days, I feel more nostalgic than ever when a parent or student asks me about something basic like course enroll, freshman year dorms or meal plans.
The funny thing is that even though things like course enroll feel very routine and basic to us now, as a prospective student there is very little that can be said to ease your mind. Everything is foreign and intimidating. Many of us thought we’d be in very different places after our freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years. Many of us change our majors, colleges and career-plan once we get on campus. That can be daunting to students who – at just 17 and 18 years old – know nothing else, but often think they already have their life planned out.
The truth is that very few of us actually have any idea what we’re doing, what we plan to do or what we will be doing with the rest of our lives. All Cornellians remember distinctly the feeling of walking out of their first prelim. Maybe you felt like you bombed it. Maybe, if you were lucky (or just a super genius), you felt like you killed it. Either way, many of us were wrong. We didn’t know yet. We had to learn. I remember calling my dad crying saying how badly I’d just failed my prelim. Guess what? I had. But so had everyone else in their raw scores, and I was fine with the curve. No matter how many times my father tried to reassure me over the phone that it would be fine, I didn’t believe him until I finally got my exam back with the curved score.
My point is – everything I knew from high school was wrong. Really. It’s near impossible to have it all figured out at such a young age, yet we live in a society where absolute certainty is expected of us, often to the point of fault. A pre-frosh’s mother even asked me about scheduling the MCATs last week – I don’t even know when I’m taking my own graduate school exams. I answered her question politely, but in the back of my head was reminded of my own thoughts of becoming a veterinarian as a pre-frosh. Here I am now, a junior in the ILR school.
My advice to the incoming freshman class would be to relax and lean into it. Come in with as few preconceived notions about what it’s like to be a student here as you can. Don’t have expectations, just go with it. Find your own path organically, not based on a laundry list of things you think you should do in college. Everyone’s college experience is different; don’t rely too heavily on information you got from any one person. No one knows what you do and don’t like, better than you.
I once heard the saying “As a freshman you don’t know, but you think you know. As a sophomore, you don’t know, and you know you don’t know. As a junior, you know, but you don’t know you know. It is not until you’re a senior that you know and you know you know.” I thought this was silly at the time, but it’s come to be so telling of my time at this school.
