Freshman Orientation 2017

SERENDIPITY | 5 Survival Tips and Tricks for New Cornell Students

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Cornell is a difficult place – colloquially, we are known as the easiest Ivy to get into… but the hardest to graduate from. While many of you are among the swaths of high school valedictorians, science fair winners and speech and debate aficionados, all of you will certainly fail at some point in your college careers. Whether you be staring at your grades with a terrible kind of awe, realizing three days later that you never turned in (or started) your final essay, or getting sent to the hospital for drinking too much during O-Week, Cornell will crush your souls in every way, shape and form. But worry not! After pressing on through four years in this frozen wasteland, you will emerge as elite graduates who have a remarkable capacity to change the world for the better.

Freshman Orientation 2017

BANDI | A Big Red Ball

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One of my formative orientation week events was Big Red Ball. For those of you who don’t know what Big Red Ball is, don’t worry—it’s really simple. All you need is two goal posts, a large open space and a ball. The rules are almost exactly like those of soccer, except instead of a small, black and white ball you use a big red ball. Like you know those big inflated balls you see in the Walmart children’s section, held inside a standing container with rubber straps so you could pull the balls out from the bottom and throw them back over the top?

Freshman Orientation 2017

ARRAY | “That’ll Never Happen To Me”

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When I teetered into my dorm room on the first day, weighed down by three bags I had lugged across the country, I wasn’t inspired by any sense of new beginning despite all the people offering me their collegiate wisdom and telling me that my life had just begun. I missed home, I missed Mom, I felt like I was still just me, packed up and shipped 3000 miles away. By that point, sitting in my dorm room, I believed, with one-hundred percent certainty, that I had taken all those pieces of advice I had  received left and right to heart. I had been told I deserved this, and I believed I did. I had been told to wear sunscreen and to find a path and stick to it, but to keep looking for other ones, and be okay with switching destinations in the middle, so long as I had a goal in sight.

Life

FECKLESS AND FRECKLED | Lesbian In A Play

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I think part of me always knew I wanted to be more than friends, but in an attempt to avoid the emotional impaling that often comes with trusting another flawed human being, I kept the burgeoning feelings to myself.  It wasn’t until she offered me socks that I realized I was in love with her. We were sitting on the edge of her ratty green couch, legs touching, our slush-ridden boots strewn across the carpet. My teeth were still audibly chattering from the cold (or maybe from sitting in close proximity to her?), an involuntary mannerism, more nettlesome than painful.  “Do you want a fresh pair of socks?” she asked with a solicitous hand on my arm.