After attending the Rose-Becker cafe, featuring Dan Schwarz , I can confidently say that we (the Cornell community) needs to re-evaluate how we define success and the contexts we apply it to. Personally, I don’t believe that there is a formula to being successful and that the processization of Cornell’s definition of success has made success singular and inflexible.

I was told as a young child that success meant being happy and living a life of passion. But from my first year at Cornell, success now means following a highly detailed and direct pipeline to the corporate world. Dan Schwarz’s advice of “getting a summer internship” and “interviewing with companies” falls right in line with this kind of thought.

Success has now become a word that equates with idiosyncrasy. Which in turn, means that only certain people who fit this mode are deemed successful. Why is it that students entering the business, consulting, or tech fields are much quicker to call themselves successful than students who study the arts or humanities? Success on Cornell’s campus so unattainable that students such as myself, whose passions lie outside of “corporate America,” are currently in the market for another word to describe our achievements and accomplishments because success has been monopolized by the corporate world and a system that values financial gain over intellectual, spiritual or relationships wealth.

I am not here to say that students who focus in business are at fault. I am only here to point out that there needs to be shift in the way we communicate certain ideals about success on this university. This is precisely why we need to redefine success and return it to other populations of students who are actively pursuing fields that don’t lead to the C-suite.