<p>Do many Cornell students pursue dual degrees? Are there any real advantages for completing a dual degree? I'm interested in both engineering and economics, but if I apply to the Class of 2010, I'd like to graduate in 2010. Should I just stick to the honors program in economics??</p>
<p>If the 2nd major your considering is Engineering, stick with just Economics. The Engineering program at Cornell is extremely intense as a single major, and requires a lot of focus. I'm not saying you couldn't do it, but it would be a TON of extra work and you would be dead after four/five years.</p>
<p>what about engineering + architecture (2nd major)</p>
<p>hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha</p>
<p>Architecture is probably one of the most time consuming majors at Cornell. I can't even imagine having to do all the arch. work as well as taking on the engineering courseload.</p>
<p>Were you accepted ED youngGbuhsut?</p>
<p>engineering + architecture will not happen. The architecutre program is a busy 5 years to begin with.</p>
<p>oh.... yea i was accepted ED ... o well that's too bad</p>
<p>you'd have to do a masters in architecture after engineering</p>
<p>how difficult is the English major?</p>
<p>I want to major in English Litagee87. From what I gather from the median grade reports, the English major is friendly to your GPA if you work hard. Is the subject itself "easy" at Cornell? Doubtful. I love English and I expect it to challenge me, especially at the great, but strangely unsung English dept. that exists at Cornell.</p>
<p>Yeah, I personally have been looking into the English dept at Cornell and have found, well, practically nothing. Have you found much?</p>
<p>On a different tangent, I hate sometimes how difficult it is to integrate diverse interests with each other. I know that's for a reason-- ie, literature really has no use in, say, biomedical engineering or some other such field-- but it still is rather frustrating.</p>
<p>The English dept. as far as the website informs us has a nice honors program, an integrated creative writing concentration (unlike most schools), contains several screened upper-level courses, and is friendly to acceleration. Off the books, Cornell's English dept. is consistently considered one of the top five in the country or at least just outside the top five. </p>
<p>As far as prestige, you've got Toni Morrisson, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon to name some of the big names.</p>
<p>Outside of the English dept., there's The Cornell Daily Sun and Epoch to name a few opportunities for English majors and the prose-inclined.</p>
<p>I know what you mean about integrating disparate interests. I want to write for a living when I graduate. In light of that I'm actually looking forward to integrating a second and possibly third separate interest in my studies for two reasons:</p>
<p>-I still don't know what I'm made of when it comes to the unimaginably, literally incomprehensibly, difficult task of publishing.</p>
<p>-Studying other subjects that you love can angle your writing in a way that lends you a unique voice. Take one of our alumni, Kurt Vonnegut. He is a perfect example of this.</p>
<p>I forgot to mention Harold Bloom, E.B. White, and Junot Diaz.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for your response. I had known about the creative writing focus and Vladimir Nabokov (which, sadly, is such a selling point for me), but most of the rest of your information was new. I'm very glad to know it's a consistently excellent department on the larger scale.</p>
<p>Good luck with your writing. I know what you mean about the publishing industry-- doesn't it seem to boil down to luck, at the end? It's so much business (what's in, what's not, etc) that decides what gets published, and I think probably many suffer for that. That's why I like McSweeney's, for example, personally: it's driving forces seem a lot less based on market forces and more based on quality, or at least some other non-commercial value (amusement value?). Of course, with every smaller, more independant and thus more open publishing house, there is that trade off for probably less readers and less money. That doesn't quite work for writers who do so as a living.</p>
<p>Anyway, another writer who succeeds at incorporating different interests into his writing? Lawrence Weschler. He has a series of essays, which he calls "convergences", all about the different facets of our lives that somehow all interconnect and wind together, from science and history to art and simple human life. They've recently been published all together, so if you're into that sort of thing, it may be worth looking into reading a few.</p>