As a freshman, one of my greatest obstacles was the inability to mentally separate myself from my equally intelligent, passionate and overachieving peers.  It took me nearly eight months to learn the necessity and importance of carving out at least one hour per day for personal time; celebrating both my mistakes and accomplishments; reaching out for help before I needed it; and seeking out friends with completely different backgrounds as me.  Over the course of my past two semesters at Cornell, I have realized that college has so much more to offer than academic success.  As Dan Schwarz, a Professor of English at Cornell and the author of over fifteen books, emphasized during a recent Becker-Rose Café session, “It doesn’t matter where you go, it’s what you do that matters.”  It is the undergraduate research, the extracurricular clubs, the athletics, the service and leadership events, and the shared experiences of learning from and struggling with a diverse community of peers that truly makes a college experience so valuable and rich.  Schwarz added to this by highlighting key focuses of each year of college and giving advice on time management, reaching out for help and planning ahead in order to succeed in college and beyond.  Even though each year of college involves new motivations, for instance networking during sophomore year and focusing on graduate school applications during junior and senior year, one key aspect that unifies all four years is the three R’s, those being Resolve, Resilience and Resourcefulness.  Without the resolve to power through a problem set at 1 AM; the resilience to change up study habits to improve after failing a prelim; and the resourcefulness to finish an essay by a deadline despite having a broken laptop, we wouldn’t be able to survive at Cornell.  Much of Schwarz’s advice resonated with the changes I had to make during my freshman year in order to find happiness.  Similar to what Schwarz advised, I decided to allocate a small chunk of free time everyday to myself, whether that be an hour to exercise, (several hours) to binge watch Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or half an hour to simply walk to West to eat dinner with friends.  Ultimately, it is the relationships, struggles, interactions and experiences that we obtain in our four years of college that enhance the person we are already.