A Day in the Life of a Cornell Senior

by Isabella de Castro

May 6, 2021

My day started out by getting up and taking a shower before heading to class. In a normal semester, I’d be heading onto central campus in the center of campus where all of the academic buildings are located, but because of Covid I’m taking most of my classes online. I tuned in to my 9 am python lecture, which a lot of people find difficult, but the key to doing well in CS 1110 is to work consistently. There are plenty of classes at Cornell that you can cram and do well in, but Python is not one of them. After My CS lecture, I’ll usually take a break and read a book or stream a show. My afternoons and evenings can get pretty packed, so I take my downtime where I can get it. The key to avoiding burnout is to make sure to give yourself breaks.

After that I headed to my assigned fridge and grabbed some food I’ve stocked up on. I’ve really appreciated that Cornell has added more full sized refrigerators to the dorms because of covid. After crunching numbers, I decided not to get a meal plan this year because they can get pretty expensive and I would spend less even if I ordered food a lot. I also usually don’t have the time to make it to a dining hall to use meal swipes while the dining halls are open, so I end up spending a lot on extra food anyway. However, I definitely don’t eat as healthy as I did when I had a meal plan because most of the dorms don’t have very good kitchens for cooking, and it can take a lot of time. Before covid, a very popular way for clubs to get people to show up to events was by catering their events, so it wasn’t uncommon for me to get two or more free full meals a week from events on campus. There’s also people constantly on the free food GroupMe who are giving away free food, often leftovers from events. If you’re going to join that group though, there are two things to know: no messaging about anything except for free food, and unless it’s orientation week, everyone in the group already knows that there’s free popcorn in Willard Straight.

After eating early lunch, I worked on getting a form ready for people who are interested in receiving graduation cords for one of my clubs, Mixed at Cornell. Cornell has a lot of different organizations for different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, everything from pre-professional groups, to dance troupes, to Greek life. I’m the President of Mixed, Cornell’s organization for multicultural students, so I’m on the executive board or e-board, but there are plenty of ways to get involved in clubs, especially by attending general body or g-body meetings which are just (typically) weekly club meetings that are open to anyone. There are some very exclusive clubs on campus that you have to apply to be a member of, but I don’t recommend joining most of these as a freshman because most people get rejected and it can make you feel like you don’t belong when really you’re just still finding your place and don’t have people to support you yet. I got very lucky and my host when I visited Cornell during Diversity Hosting really supported me and helped me meet new people and feel like I belong.

At around 2:15 I left my dorm to go to my one in person class in the Schwartz performing arts center. My class didn’t start until 2:45, but Cornell’s campus is huge and full of hills, so it takes me about 20-25 minutes to walk to class. I live in Risley Hall this year, which in addition to being the performing and creative arts dorm is also the closest dorm on north campus to central campus. North campus is (obviously) to the north of central campus and is where all of the freshman dorms are located. Schwartz however, is located in College Town. College Town is an area just south of campus where a lot of restaurants and non-university owned apartment buildings are located. Sometimes people call this south campus because there are a few university owned dorms and the Schwartz building, but most people call it College Town. Once I got to Schwartz, I had my class Project Terrarium Imagined, which is a studio based class on world building that counts as a theatrical design class towards my theater minor. Cornell has a lot of fun classes and interesting majors and minors, so I would definitely encourage everyone to try classes that just sound interesting. If I had done more of that myself, I probably would have done a double major in Information Science.

Once class was over, I went one building over to College Town Bagels to pick up some food for the next few days. In addition to their really good sandwiches, they also have these premade meals that you can just microwave that are both tasty and reasonably priced, usually around $9 each whereas a meal on campus is more like $12. After that, I went back to my room and worked on homework for a few hours before going to a workshop for tech for my theater club, the Cog Dog Theater Troupe. I enjoy them because I always get to learn something new, and half the time they run way long because I’ve become good friends with everyone who goes to those meetings, so we just end up hanging out and chatting.

Around 10, we all finally decided to be productive again and ended our zoom meeting, so I heated up one of the meals I got earlier and ate dinner before going back to my homework. Around 1 am I decided to call it a night even though I didn’t get around to studying because I find that getting sleep helps me do well more than studying.

I hope you enjoyed hearing about my day! And if you’re interested in finding people who will support you as you’re trying to find your place like I did, check out the app CUsoon. CUsoon is an app that pairs first-gen and/or low-income (FGLI) students with mentors who are also FGLI, to help you experience the best transition to campus possible.