<p>Cornell has tremendous resources for academic help. I agree that many students simply don’t take advantage of it, either out of laziness or pride. In my 4 years at Cornell, I’ve only found 1 professor to be unapproachable. All of the others made themselves available via office hours and usually very few students actually attended office hours. There are also learning centers, tutors, TA’s, 00 courses for those who need extra help. </p>
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<p>I don’t understand it either. If you plan on being a top student in law school or if you just want to pass med school, you’re going to work a lot harder than you did in college. To me, if Cornell gets any easier, it’s really doing its students a disservice in terms of preparation for post-grad life. 1000 students start out as premeds each year. 470 will end up applying to med school (1/2 as seniors and 1/2 as alumni). About 70% of those will actually get into med school. To me, this is perfect since I don’t think Cornell has over 300 students who can realistically pass med school, muchless succeed in med school.</p>
<p>I agree with norcal. I don’t think Cornell is any more difficult than other top schools, college students just love to complain about their classes, no matter what their major is :)</p>
<p>Also, what is this cliff/suicide thing that I keep hearing about?
Is this just another rumor or has there seriously been a lot of suicides?
More importantly, does that mean that the student body consists of a lot of depressed individuals or is it more of a happy happy environment?</p>
<p>There haven’t been “a lot” of suicides, but there were two big ones last year that made media attention. Unfortunately, this and the gorges common around the campus and Ithaca make it seem that suicides are a frequent phenomenon. Suicides themselves aren’t common, but there are incidents every year in which people get involved with the gorges.</p>
<p>As for the student body, I can’t speak for all of it. The environment, though, isn’t happy, happy. People generally keep to themselves in public, but most folks aren’t real jerks anyway. Almost everyone gets quite stressed with work at some point or another and there are people that do fall into depression. I would not say, however, that this is an obvious thing.</p>
<p>The rumor that “Cornell has one of the highest suicide rates in the country” is false. Many people seem to “take advantage” of Cornell’s large number of waterfalls, gorges, and bridges, to stir up a misconception.</p>
<p>It’s sort of difficult to generalize the entire student body. In college, you’ll find that there are niches everywhere, ranging from athletic jocks to down-to-earth, laid back people, to geeky video game nerds. There certainly will be people who are having the time of their lives while others may be struggling or even going through a “slump” that’s completely unrelated to being at Cornell. Bottom line, you’ll find the “happy vs depressed” theme almost at any college. It’s what you make most of it, hopefully the former.</p>
<p>It depends on the classes you choose to take each semester. Try to space out hard classes. For those who want to major in Biology, be aware of some notorious classes like Biogd 2800-genetic, which can really make you study 24/7, and may still get a bad grade at the end.</p>
I’m not in college yet so I don’t understand 100% how this works, but doesn’t that mean it will be curved and for example if you got a 1.5/5 that would probably put you in the A range.</p>
<p>yes. But the thing is we spend about an average of 1-2 hours a day in addition to the scheduled 2 hour lab time per week for this class. And after all the hard work, you got 1.5/5. I guess my point is to get ready to be disappointed.</p>