<p>I think the work demands may be tougher in the sciences/math areas than in most other fields. At least I have the skid marks on my back to show for it, all those years ago, and my D2 who is there now in Humanities is having a much better go of it. Of course another possibility is she’s just a lot smarter than me.</p>
<p>The engineers were always whining about how much work they had, and my physics courses were much harder than the engineering courses (though I did not whine, audibly at least).</p>
<p>But to be honest, this is generic, for the top tier of schools at least, in these majors.
Nobody is strolling through the other schools in these subject areas either.</p>
<p>There are times I wondered if I might be better off , academically, elsewhere, but the move would not have been to a peer school, that wouldn’t accomplish anything, it would have been to a school a tier or two down. “Big fish in small pond”, you never know how that would have played out. Though maybe it would have wound up 'small fish in small pond", worst of all worlds. But all in all, with the grades I got, I probably wound up doing better than I deserved. I wish I arrived there with better study habits, but I don’t regret going there.</p>
<p>After you control for the engineering students (which Cornell has a lot more of than places like Duke or Dartmouth or Georgetown), the numbers are basically the exact same, if not a little bit less at Cornell.</p>
<p>Here’s a theory I may be willing to entertain: Cornell, because it is larger, has a higher number of students of lower academic abilities, but the same basic academic expectations of these other schools. Thus it seems harder for a certain subset of the population, but for anybody who is cross-admitted between, say, Cornell and Princeton, Cornell won’t seem any more difficult. And at the same time, Cornell has more 1500+ SAT students than Princeton has total, so there are obviously a lot of very smart people at Cornell.</p>
<p>Whether you have to work hard to get an A- at Cornell is entirely subjective and is simply a matter of opinion. I’m not going to debate that. The only thing that can be debated is whether Cornell is hard in relation to other schools. Talking about how hard engineers have to work is meaningless to me. Engineering is a difficult major at any university. That has to do with the subject matter, not the university. </p>
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<p>I’ve never said the difficulty of Cornell is the same as any other school. I’ve said that it is the same as any other TOP 20 school. I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.</p>
<p>As for how much students are “studying,” I’m willing to bet it’s a lot less than you think. We just had a class in med school where we were testing how difficult it was to change patient behaviors. As an experiment, we tested how difficult it was to change our own behaviors. For my project, I kept careful track of how much I was studying each day down to the minute. Every time I went on Espn.com, I stopped the stopwatch. Every time I answered the phone call, I stopped the stopwatch. So, the minutes recorded were the actual minutes I studied. For 8 consecutive days, these were the times I spent studying (in minutes): 114, 232, 200, 75, 153, 193, 258, 73. This was MED SCHOOL. Trust me, I study around 3-4x as much in med school as I did at Cornell.</p>
<p>If you ask me on any of those days how much I studied, I would answer “all day.” But, the reality is that many of those “study” hours were actually spent surfing the web or on CC or chatting online.</p>
<p>we all know you and norcalguy are genius…
how do you explain computer labs on north campus full with all-nighter students? these may not be ALL cornell students…but still</p>
<p>Since he and I are geniuses, then you should carefully listen to what we say and THINK a bit before replying.</p>
<p>Sure, if you go to Uris the night before an orgo exam, it’ll be full of hard studying, stressed out students. The night before a major project is due, the computer labs are probably jam packed with students. Sure, they’re stressed now. But, how stressed were they a week ago when they were getting drunk? If you procrastinate and then have to pull an all-nighter, I have no sympathy for you. I was a student at Cornell not too long ago. I know how much people really study during the non-exam weeks. It’s not that much. And then the exam rolls around, they hole themselves up in the library, complain about how unfairly hard Cornell is and how students at Harvard are showered with A’s. Talk about delusional. </p>
<p>By far my least favorite thing about Cornell…THIS^</p>
<p>To address your computer labs question, I used to go to the computer labs quite a bit on both North and West Campus. Do you ever pay attention to what people are actually doing on the computers?</p>
<p>Far from it. I was below the 75th percentile in SAT scores for ILR and barely graduated in the top 20 percent of my class. I also earned below median grades in aprrox. 20% of my classes.</p>
<p>I was rejected from eight graduate schools for PhD work, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern, Michigan, Berkeley, and Maryland.</p>
<p>If I was a genius I would have gotten into one of those.</p>
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<p>There are 3600 students on North Campus. There might be 60 computers total in the labs on North Campus. Do some math.</p>
<p>I agree. This is the worst thing about Cornell. The people who think that Cornell is really difficult and impossible and unfair when it is no different from any other top school.</p>
<p>When I was a freshman in Dickson, the lab there had more people lan-ing WOW then people doing work. A better sample will be the number of people working in Duffield. ;)</p>
<p>I think one of the debates/reservations many prospective students have regards Cornell’s “isolated” location. </p>
<p>Here is my view as someone who attended Cornell and is now in grad school in an awesome city:</p>
<p>You don’t have to be a rural hippy to like Ithaca. Many of us who went to Cornell and had great experiences also love city life. Right now, I can go to large prestigious museums or go shopping at big department stores or attend professional sports games. Someone who goes to college in a large city will have those same advantages.</p>
<p>But, I have the entire rest of my life to enjoy those advantages. The stuff I was able to do at Cornell, I really can’t do now. At Cornell, I could walk half a mile and grab an ice cream cone at the Dairy Bar. If I ask one of my classmates today to go with me just to get an ice cream cone, they look at me like I’m 5-years-old. At Cornell, I could go sledding down Libe Slope in the winters or get drunk at a frat party without anyone judging me. I can’t do those things today.</p>
<p>Cornell offers a true college experience. This is the kind of experience you get when you have an actual campus and an actual college community full of diverse students. You don’t get this kind of experience when you have an attenuated campus like NYU. You don’t get this kind of experience when you go to a commuter school. </p>
<p>I love city life. But, I would much rather have a great college experience and enjoy the advantages of the city as a grad student than to enjoy the city as a college student and miss out on the college experience. Do things in college you can’t do at any other time of your life.</p>
<p>how many kids in computer science have a 3.6? and what year are they. </p>
<p>cayuga or anyone else…is there information about this available anywhere? </p>
<p>some kids can be free to do as they please ray192 without much structure but i have seen far too many (myself included) think they be as carefree without suffering :(</p>
<p>Okay, here is what I got out of Cornell so far (I’m a freshman).</p>
<p>The kids that work extremely hard but aren’t too smart don’t do too well.
The kids that are really smart but don’t work too hard do significantly better.</p>
<p>I do less work than in high school. That’s about 1-2 hours of work a night. I took 17 credits last semester and 20 this semester and pledged and I currently have a 3.6. Yeah, I know that’s not that high, but it would have been easy to do better.</p>
<p>i dont agree with the “arent too smart” part…at least not for all of them…</p>
<p>there are some students who work hard but still cant get any higher than a B…yes…but not enough to worry most here…unless u went to a school in the ghetto or somewhere in rural midwest :-d</p>
<p>You’re one of those students who could a) either apply themselves and start to get a lot of really great things out of your Cornell experience – research, faculty friends, scholarship grants, etc., or b) you could hang low in the fraternity house, enjoy yourself and your friends, and learn a fair amount, but not really go that extra step.</p>
<p>Playing video games certainly doesn’t help matters.</p>
<p>yes Cayuga lol…so ur saying that maybe a B is all a student should expect? </p>
<p>i’m not even talking about myself when i say studied hard only to get a b…i’m talking about a friend of mine who worked her butt off but only got Bs…i’m guessing in classes where professors only give out a 1-5 As per class? :<</p>