<p>I hate this website sometimes.</p>
<p>Cornell is not a basketball school. Hockey is the biggest thing there.</p>
<p>keefer,
While I agree that hockey is usually more popular at Cornell, I think that folks got pretty excited about the basketball this winter in Ithaca as both the men and the women won the Ivy crowns and the automatic bids to the NCAA tournaments that come with that. In terms of attendance numbers this winter, the mens basketball and the mens hockey were nearly the same with around 4000 per game.</p>
<p>“The uniqueness of the Lynah experience certainly places the Cornell athletic experience a notch above a school like Northwestern, which despite it’s Big 10 affiliation, doesn’t have a lot of school spirit going for it. (Maybe if it makes it back to the Rose Bowl?)”</p>
<p>Oh good lord. School spirit is defined in a whole host of ways, not just merely shouting in a large stadium for a winning team.</p>
<p>As bad of a metric as this maybe, US News and World Report puts Cornell 12th and Cal 21st. As far as engineering goes, Cal does outrank Cornell (3rd and 7th). Also, “stupidest Ivy” is similar to the opposite of tallest midget (whatever that maybe).
And, anybody who knows anything knows that Cal is where the people who couldn’t get into Stanford go.</p>
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Oh my god, you must be ■■■■■■■■.</p>
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Just correcting the record, Cal undergrad engineering is #2 (tied with Stanford) in USNWR 2008 rankings.</p>
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<p>Yep. I’m ■■■■■■■■. Perhaps just as ■■■■■■■■ as the Duke Lacrosse players who hosted a lewd an illegal event and wrote disgusting and vehemently hateful emails to get themselves excited about it.</p>
<p>And unfortunately my jab is impossible to prove otherwise because Duke never travels much for out of conference games. Speaking of which, a bunch of scrawny non-scholarship Ivy League kids were able to hang with Coach K’s team a little bit longer than you would have liked this past January, huh?</p>
<p>But seriously. Let’s say that Duke Lacrosse schedules a game against Syracuse a couple of years from now at the Dome. And for argument’s sake, let’s assume that Duke’s lacrosse team falls from grace after all the stars who will forever have asterisks after their names graduate, and that Duke doesn’t make it to the NCAA tournament the next couple of years – much like Cornell hockey did these last two years. Do you really think any Duke fans would make the trek up to Syracuse to watch them play? Do you think anybody would be nearly as excited as the Cornell fans are currently about the fact that we are playing North Dakota?</p>
<p>Not a chance.</p>
<p>I was at the NCAA Lacrosse Championship in Baltimore last year. The Blue Devil fans were outclassed by the fans from Cornell, JHU, and Delaware. And I would hate to have seen how little support the Dookies would have gotten had they not misbehaved themselves so badly two years ago.</p>
<p>Have fun in Durham’s Dystopia, painting your face blue, and then crying your face blue when you don’t even get to go the sweet sixteen.</p>
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Except for undergrad chemical engineering, in which Cal is #1 in the entire known universe (and probably the entire unknown universe, although that may take a bit longer to verify). :D</p>
<p>^ Nah, for ChemE it was No. 2 as well…behind MIT.</p>
<p>For graduate, it shared #1 ranking with MIT and Caltech. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>^ No, that was in the US News ranking. I’m talking about the entire known universe–that’s a different ranking. Don’t be modest, Bro.:)</p>
<p>“Do you really think any Duke fans would make the trek up to Syracuse to watch them play? Do you think anybody would be nearly as excited as the Cornell fans are currently about the fact that we are playing North Dakota?”</p>
<p>Do you not get that no one cares? Woo-woo, some of your fellow classmates are tossing around a ball! Big whoops!</p>
<p>pizzagirl,
Your intolerance is showing again for people who actually enjoy the athletic life of a college. I know you didn’t give a hoot for this while you were at Northwestern, but it is actually an important part of the undergraduate experience for many students at many colleges, including some of the elites. </p>
<p>Would you make similar fun of the Cornell fans who travelled down from Ithaca to NYC last winter to watch their hockey team? Would you make similar fun of Northwestern fans who travelled to Philadelphia last spring to watch the women’s lacrosse team win another national title? How about the Stanford fans who travelled to Tampa for their women’s national title basketball game?</p>
<p>I give this thread 50 more post before it becomes Cornell vs [Filler] flame war, like that Duke vs Chicago thread.</p>
<p>“Would you make similar fun of the Cornell fans who travelled down from Ithaca to NYC last winter to watch their hockey team? Would you make similar fun of Northwestern fans who travelled to Philadelphia last spring to watch the women’s lacrosse team win another national title? How about the Stanford fans who travelled to Tampa for their women’s national title basketball game?”</p>
<p>Good for them; I hope they all have fun. It’s stupid to use it to prove that one school “has more spirit” than other (because as 45 Percenter has pointed out repeatedly in the past, school spirit encompasses a hell of a lot more than simply cheering in large groups of people for sports teams) and it’s stupid to use it to prove that one school is more worthy of attending or “better” than other.</p>
<p>I think if one wants to make an apples-for-apples comparison and compare the athletic life and campus/local area enthusiasm for sports at ABC College vs XYZ College, then the attendance numbers and issues of student/fan interest are highly relevant. Like it or not, at some colleges and including some very elite ones, athletic life is a big part of the undergraduate’s experience. </p>
<p>In the case of Duke, there is K-ville, the student tent village that springs up every year in anticipation of big upcoming basketball games. This is visible and reflects a strong interest level of a large part of the student body (perhaps Cornell has something similar for their hockey; perhaps not) and is indicative of the campus impact that the basketball program has at Duke. Pointing out a difference in athletic life with another school is absolutely legitimate, just as any other school is able to respond with its versions of school spirit, eg, trips to local museums or whatever. </p>
<p>Different things will appeal to different people and we all benefit from understanding how undergraduate life differs on these various college campuses.</p>
<p>This thread is getting absurd. What does a school’s sports have to do with anything? Check out CalTech’s basketball program. CalTech, therefore, must really suck as a school. Absurd.</p>
<p>For starters - yes, I went to Cornell. The people who bash it the hardest did not, so they really have no grounding upon which to base their assumptions. Frankly, I respected it a great deal more AFTER I went to it than before when I was swayed by ignorant and insecure people such as those bashing it here.</p>
<p>I’ll just say this - what brings Cornell’s reputation down amongst the Ivy League elitists is what makes it a truly great university pursuing a truly unique path. It is becoming the world’s first transnational university. It offers top notch education for everyone from farmers and architects to Investment bankers and veterinarians. </p>
<p>How one makes a blanket statement of quality about such a diverse school is beyond me. There are certainly people there - such as aspiring farmers - who are not traditional Ivy League academics. They are, however, amongst the best in their field. The next time you buy a gallon of milk you probably had someone from Cornell either in one of the major agricultural corporations or working one of the farms who had a hand in it.</p>
<p>Cornell’s focus on mixing traditional liberal arts with hands-on practicality makes people - even Cornellians - feel like it is somehow inferior. Imagine if all American universities could offer such an incredible education to “any person in any field of study”, as its motto goes. And, for the record, several other Ivies tried to become land grant universities for their states but were denied due to the state’s unwillingness to trust a private institution.</p>
<p>To try and compare that to the mission of Dartmouth which is completely different from the mission of Brown or Harvard or Columbia or UPenn is absurd and childish - especially if you have nothing but your family’s impression to go on and the endowment provided by the uber powerful to shore up ranking statistics. I wish people would just leave these schools alone unless they have attended all of them.</p>
<p>Perhaps I was a little bit overzealous on the Northwestern comment, but it does seem that their big-time athletic prowess has fallen with the fortunes of its football program. </p>
<p>And I’m obviously being a little bit over the top when it comes to the Duke comments, and I would be lying if I wasn’t trying to provoke the Blue Devils fans a bit. But the obnoxious arrogance of the Duke propaganda on these boards is really suffocating.</p>
<p>But coming back to Cornell, all I was trying to express was that among schools in similar positions – namely Patriot and Ivy League schools – Cornell’s athletic programs stand out due to the success of men’s hockey, lacrosse, and wrestling, and they receive considerable support from the student body. It might offer the best campus environment for athletics of these groups of schools.</p>
<p>Best to all.</p>
<p><a href=“%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060224763-post17.html]#17[/url]”>quote</a> Family member turned down Cornell for Cal because everyone said Cornell is the stupidest ivy. I grow up to believe (sic) Cornell is overrated and this will not change in the foreseeable future.
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<p>[Projective</a> identification](<a href=“http://guiltedgirls.tripod.com/id9.html]Projective”>Defense Mechanisms Part 2), a known psychological defense mechanism, includes the following behavior:</p>
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<p>cayuga,
I’m with you in describing Cornell’s athletic life in comparison with other Ivies and the Patriot schools. I think it offers one of the best, if not the best, alternative of this universe of colleges. </p>
<p>I also think that the landscape is changing. With the modification of the financial aid rules, students who previously matriculated on scholarship to some of the more athletically prominent Division I colleges will now find their way to various Ivy destinations. I think Harvard in particular is taking steps to bolster their athletic life and it will be interesting to see if this upsets the competitive balance in the Ivies in the years ahead.</p>