<p>Oh darn! I wrote this huge post and it is now lost in cyber-space!<br>
Short version:
Congratulations to wisdom, angelfish and brainiac!! Your enthusiasm just spills from your posts!
D is freshman at Cornell and just loves it- my shy D has just blossomed at Cornell! Take advantage of everything the university will offer you. You’ll never have this wonderful opportunities to try so many things. College is the time to try some new things! Have fun, work hard and enjoy your your time on the hill!</p>
<p>Wow wisdom86–your entry was inspiring. Congratulations to you!</p>
<p>I’m heading to Princeton but my best friend is going to Cornell and she’s really excited. THEY BURN DRAGONS!! /jealous.</p>
<p>I love Cornell because my kid is so happy. </p>
<p>We just came back from Cornell yesterday. Our daughter had a dance performance. We were very impressed by the overall quality of dancers in the group. We read the dancers’ bio - mechanical engineer, physics, math, art history, biology. Few dancers had Dance as a minor. </p>
<p>The weather couldn’t have been more beautiful. So many young girls in sun dresses. We ate at Just a Taste, great steamed clams.</p>
<p>Thanks woody and morrismm =] </p>
<p>oldfort, that sounds really lovely =]]</p>
<p>ok, so is cornell really THAT conmpetitive?</p>
<p>i dont mind working hard at all and im a pretty competitive person. but ive heard cornell is WAYY over the top on that category. is this true?</p>
<p>Nope. Not true.</p>
<p>I’m about the least competitive person you would ever meet, and there are plenty like me. However, there are competitive people here, they just aren’t as extreme as you may think.</p>
<p>so its nothing more than any other ivy/ top tier school?</p>
<p>Gradeinflation.com is your friend.</p>
<p>Average GPA at Cornell as of 2006: 3.36</p>
<p>Average GPA at some of the peer schools (2006):
Duke: 3.42
MIT: 3.26 (in 1999 compared with Cornell’s average GPA in 1999 which was 3.22)
Harvard: 3.45 (2006)
Princeton: 3.27
Dartmouth: 3.36
JHU: 3.24</p>
<p>What is my point? Certain schools have the REPUTATION of being grade deflated (Cornell, MIT, JHU). But, the reputation does not bear out in reality. Look, school administrators aren’t stupid. No one, not even at Cornell or MIT, is looking to make the academic experience as miserable as possible. The grading at these schools is tough but fair.</p>
<p>I’m a bit late to reply, but I figured I’d throw my two cents in anyway.</p>
<p>Absolutely, positively, without a doubt, the best thing about Cornell is the people! If nothing else speaks to you (the beautiful campus, the academics/prestige, the food?), the one thing that should draw you in is the people. Cornell is so diverse: there are the first generation college students, the internationals, the nerdy folk, the jocks, the Long Islanders, pretty much any kind of person you can think of…all on one 745 acre campus. Even though everybody has their own interests, there’s no shortage of people who share similar beliefs and likes (and dislikes). I have befriended some of the most interesting people I could have ever hoped to imagine meeting…and you just can’t find that at other schools. Hands down.</p>
<p>Oldfort…I was up at the same time as you. Did we happen to chat outside the freshman dorms?</p>
<p>Norcalguy…I understand that there are mean grades posted and each of my sons have taken classes with means as high as A-. However that does not take into account the fact that you may be in a class where many or most of the students never leave the library. I have two sons, one is an engineering student and the other is a hard science/pre med. They are very intelligent IMHO and they have worked extremely hard. I am always so concerned when your posts make Cornell sound like it is just like any other school. It is not. If students are considering Cornell than they should be doing so knowing that it is one of the finest institutions of learning in the country. They should also be aware that they will be working very hard to get those A’s. Not everyone has a genious I.Q and can breeze through classes (although my sons know many who do). I just think it is important to present Cornell for what it really is. You attend Cornell because you do expect to work hard.</p>
<p>No, that wasn’t me. We only went up there for the show and stayed at the hotel, so we didn’t make it to that side of the campus. We were helping out at the auditorium most of the time (my H was helping and I was supervising). We drove 8 hours to watch her dance for 20 min.</p>
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<p>Never leave the library? Give me a break. I’m certain they spend more than half of their waking hours not studying.</p>
<p>Recently I went through about 20+ resumes from Cornell engineering. Most of their GPAs were around 3.0. When I interviewed them, most of them were very intelligent and well spoken (not the nerdy type I usually expected of engineering students). My daughter as a math/econ has around 3.5, but that’s with a lot of hard work in math. Her friends who are humanities majors have higher GPA than my daughter, same for Hotel and AEM. One may argue that people in those majors may have better aptitude for those courses. But my daughter gets As in finance, accounting, most of humanities courses, even econ. It’s math that’s killing her. I do think there are certain majors(courses) that are easier than others.</p>
<p>I do think students at Cornell work very hard, at least looking at my daughter. She is not breezing through. In speaking with her friends from other top tier schools, she feels her workload is heavier. Her GPA is also lower than her HS friends at other colleges. On the other hand, she does feel like she is getting a great education.</p>
<p>We did hire a student with 3.0 GPA from Cornell, and our daughter’s GPa didn’t hurt her when it came to summer internship either. I think many employers do appreciate difficulty of Cornell, and calibre of its students.</p>
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<p>Math will kill you everywhere.</p>
<p>^^^
We had brunch at the Statler, which I would recommend if you haven’t done so already.
I bet you enjoyed every minute of that 20 minute performance!!! We actually walked all around campus with our camera so that we could get the Cornell pictures that our sons have not taken yet (third year). I keep telling them that the time is going by quickly so use those great cameras that we gave you LOL. I could not resist going back to the freshman dorms and getting pictures of the bicycles outside the dorm rooms. Those were the days…pre car.</p>
<p>Cayuga— I have been at Cornell on a Saturday morning and see many kids on the way to the library with books on their backs. Are you trying to say that this is not true? What is so wrong about presenting the truth… in order to get an A- at Cornell you have worked very hard</p>
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<p>I’m not certain what that anecdote will tell you, other than the fact that some students like to go to the library on Saturday mornings. Even then, you don’t know if they are working. They are probably spending a lot of their time surfing the Internet, texting with their friends, and otherwise not studying. If you go to lots of colleges, especially colleges without a football program, you will see students going to the library on a Saturday morning. It’s what students do. They study.</p>
<p>I was never a Saturday morning library person – I was, however, a Friday night library person, often staying there until 10 o’clock or so finishing up my next week’s work – mostly because I didn’t have any ECs to do on Friday nights and people didn’t really start hanging out until 11 PM or so. </p>
<p>But even though I was a Friday night library person I still probably never did more than 20 hours of work outside of the classroom a week. And I wrote a 120 page honors thesis.</p>
<p>Here is the distribution of hours worked per week on schoolwork outside of the classroom:</p>
<p>Less than an hour: 3.02 percent
1 - 2 hours: 3.42
3 - 5 hours: 10.96
6 - 10 hours: 25.02
10 - 15 hours: 22.24
16 - 20 hours: 18.35
20 + hours: 17.00</p>
<p>That means that two-thirds of the campus is spending less than two hours per day studying. That isn’t very much, if you ask me, especially when the average GPA at Cornell is a 3.4 or so.</p>
<p>Admittedly, it is a little bit higher for the engineering school:</p>
<p>Less than 1 hour: 2.67
1 - 2 hours: 1.33
3 - 5 hours: 6.67
6 - 10 hours: 18.22
11 - 15 hours: 21.33
15 - 20 hours: 20.44
20 + hours: 29.33</p>
<p>That still means that HALF of the engineering college is spending <em>less than</em> 15 hours per week studying.</p>