<p>You know what guys? I don’t see the point of this thread. Why Cornell? Here’s how I see it: if you can’t stand the brutality, stay out of Ithaca. If you can, this is your place.</p>
<p>Cornell is an infamously rigorous school with really crap weather in the middle of nowhere. Being slightly psychotic is almost an admissions requirement, our Greeks are a little douchier and a lot less fun, our bars card like they’ve forgotten that students are their target market, everything is expensive, everything is far, everything is up a hill, there’s a fence around Thurston Bridge to remind you that people have jumped off of it, AND your friends are joking about killing themselves every 20 minutes. Also, forget about having a prolific love life until after you graduate. There will be times where, faced with competition from better schools or smarter kids in your school, you will feel like you can’t succeed at anything.</p>
<p>But Cornell is so much more than that - it’s a school that you should only go to if you won the “Most Stressed” superlative in high school and want to come here because you’re slightly masochistic and you know it, or if you’re the valedictorian but for some reason Cornell’s still the only one to take you. Cornell is that miserable zombie trek from Olin to Uris Library at 2 AM, getting inebriated at wine tours, stumbling along in collegetown after getting kicked out of a frat annex, singing along to the clock tower chimes, HATING THE SUN, riding the bus with townies who haven’t showered in weeks, eating way too much food, drinking way too much coffee, and spending as much time finding good places to study as you do actually studying. Stop viewing Cornell through such an objective lens. The reason our rate of sending kids to grad school is so low is because we are a school of “any person, any study” (although you will surely feel differently during Course Enroll)… do you really think that all the kids studying Developmental Sociology, Communications, Food Science, Asian Studies, Apparel Design, or Natural Resources are crowding Yale Medical School? </p>
<p>If you are being depressed or think that you have hit rock bottom (Saugus - stop being dramatic, you can’t go from loving college to becoming seriously depressed within a week), it’s because you’ve failed to realize how little each grade matters in the grand scheme or because you seriously spend more time whining than actually working. You’ve failed to realize that that elite consulting club you didn’t get into with its 5% acceptance rate (but you should’ve gotten in, right? you had a 3.8 and a great resume, and you thought you rocked that interview) will just end up getting deleted from your resume in a few years anyway. </p>
<p>As for the argument that Cornell holds back good students because of the lack of opportunities offered to students after graduation in the workplace or in grad school admissions, I call ********. Our “rates” are lower, largely because of how large our student body is. Goldman Sachs hires more undergrads from Cornell AEM than Harvard business and NYU Stern. Who on earth do you hear saying, “Sucks that that kid went to Cornell instead of a better school, THAT must be the reason why he’s not getting anywhere in his career.” I cannot believe that we’re even being critiqued over such things on this site.</p>