Author Archives: Julia Widerstrom

Beer Is Still Not My Thing

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This was my first Saturday Rose House event outside of campus and it felt really nice getting off campus even if just for a couple of hours. We went to the Ithaca Brewery and had a tour and a tasting of their beer. I did not know much about the process of making beer, and so it was fascinating to have a look inside the factory. However, I do think the group was a bit too large and I noticed it was unfortunately hard to hear everything that the guide said due to this. So, I do not know exactly how beer is made even after the tour, but even so it was fun to have a look around and see the huge containers for the beer. This is a picture of me and my friend Kelly in front of the containers, to give you an idea of just how big they were:

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And this is a picture of our very happy guide:

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We also looked at their storage and of the way that they package the beer. Apparently, if something goes wrong with the way they fill the bottles, so there is either too much or too little beer in the bottles, the workers get to keep the beer for themselves!

This is a picture of where they store the beer:

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Interestingly, the beer can be stored in a cold room and then go on a truck that is relatively warm and then be cooled down yet again without any damage to the taste! Apparently, you can do this heating and cooling process up to five times without the beer tasting any different. We also learnt that the idea that beer must be served ice cold is a way for companies to make up for their lack of quality beer. When beer gets to room temperature more of the flavors and undertones come out, and so if the beer is no good it would benefit the producers if the customers thought that they should consume the beer when it was still really cold.

 

At the end of the tour we got to taste beer as well as a non-alcoholic drink. And while I hate to say this, I think I can conclude that beer really is not my thing. I could feel some nice undertones in it, but the strong taste of beer nevertheless drowned out most of them. I think beer might be an acquired taste really, and I have just never had the energy to get past my initial dislike for it in order to start enjoying it after some time. Also, when I was a kid, I had the misfortune of mixing up mine and my mom’s glasses and so I took a large sip of beer and I think that this experience, at such a young age, might have sadly traumatized me for life and made it impossible for me to truly enjoy beer. But who knows, maybe I will enjoy it one day?

Put Down Your Phone!

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Last Thursday I went to a Rose Scholars event not knowing anything more about it other than the fact that they would try to teach us how to thrive at Cornell. At first, I was a bit skeptical, as I have heard many motivational talks about the small things to change in your life and it hasn’t made that great an impact on my life. But for some reason, this event really resonated with me and I went away with slightly different views of how I should lead my life. The most important thing for me was when they discussed our use of technology. I suddenly realized that I use every spare moment, every single one that I have, by looking at my phone. And I thought to myself that maybe I am having too many impressions and too little time where I just exist without an immediate purpose.

 

After the event, I tried to put down my phone and my computer more often, and it was harder than I thought. I notice that I slip up all the time, but I still have seen some benefits already, even though I have only practiced this new self-control for less than a week now. One of them is that I feel that it is easier for me to focus on my homework, as I don’t have so many distractions anymore. My mind also feels more collected in general somehow.

 

So, I am very pleased that I chose to go to this specific event. I only wish I had taken notes as they said a lot of very wise things to us. The presenters, Vice President Susan Murphy and Catherine Thrasher-Carroll, were both very nice individuals as well and I stayed for a dinner with them afterward, which I enjoyed a lot.

Is Growth of Another Necessary to Love Them?

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What is love and how do we love? These were the questions that a few Rose scholars got together last Saturday to discuss. At first, these questions seem so big that you have no idea where even to start, but Antonio, our discussion leader, kept asking us questions that led us in the right direction and that made us think. He presented to us an account of love that originally was taken from M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, and it reads: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” I personally really like the idea of love being an extension of one’s own self to another person, but I think there might be some issues with this quote anyway.

 

First of all, I think the word purpose implies full-knowledge of what will indeed make another person grow, and I think that the word intent might be better suited as that does not imply that you have to fully understand the needs of another person in order to love them (because how do you fully understand the needs of another?). Secondly, I think the word spiritual is unnecessary as it only implies a kind of relationship with God that quite frankly I do not see as important for this discussion about love. Lastly, and most importantly, I do not really agree with the general idea that you have to make another person grow in order to be able to love them. I think all loving relationships have ups and downs, and I do not think that you necessarily stop loving someone when you are at a low point, even if it leads you to say something you later regret to that person. I do not think it is even humanly possible to ALWAYS make someone grow, and therefore this quote seems to suggest to me that the love comes and goes and that it is not a constant thing. And while I do not think that love is static, I also do not personally like to think of it as that fleeting. To me, love always seemed like the greater force behind a relationship that generally leads it on the right track, rather than a switch that is either on or off in a relationship.

 

This of course leads us to the question of where the limit for natural conflict in a relationship leads up to abuse of another person. We discussed this last Saturday as well and people seemed to have very differing views on the matter. I do not think there is an easy answer to this question, but I do think it is very important. I also got the feeling that the definitions of love that we looked at tried very clearly to make a boundary between abuse and love, saying that it is either or, but as my argument above suggests, I do not think it is that clear cut. Naturally, there is some limit because we can all agree on situations that are not lovable and simply abusive, but just because we cannot define that limit I do not think it is called for to mold the definition of love into one that is honestly quite hard to follow if you are human and therefore prone to ups and downs in relationships.

The Intersection of Art, Science and Conservation

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Last Wednesday, I joined a large group of Rose Scholars and watched the documentary Fragile Legacy. It talked mainly about the Blaschka glass models of invertebrates in the ocean, but also touched on the sustainability of marine ecosystems. While it was a powerful combination of art, science and conservation, I do think that the movie could have been a little bit longer and gone into even more depth about the sustainability aspect of it all. It clearly states that things have changed dramatically in the ocean, but it gives quite a gentle push toward change and does not give as lucid directions as to how this change could come about. But maybe that was never the intention with this documentary? Maybe its purpose was instead to stay away from causing people guilt, and to be an eye-opener that might appeal to people who are not completely comfortable about having the knowledge of climate change. And the documentary does deal with exactly those feelings. There is a clip when a man (I believe the director) sits on a rock and talks about the enormous feelings that climate change produces in the people who choose not to look away from the issue. And I do think that this movie’s purpose was maybe not to educate fully, but to serve more as a push for people to educate themselves.

 

After the documentary was shown, we talked to Professor Drew Harvell about the process of making the movie and her role in it. We also discussed the loss of the starfish along the western coast. She explained for those who did not know, what a keystone species is; namely a species that regulates the abundance of a lot of other species. She however hesitated to draw too strong of a line between global warming and the deaths of the starfish, choosing instead to settle on the fact that while we do not know for sure, we can know that the process of disease spreading was sped up by the increasing temperatures in the oceans.

 

Overall, I thought this was a good and thought-provoking movie, and I wish that more people would see it- especially people who are hesitant to take on those enormous feelings of fear related to climate change- because it does a good job of explaining the issue at hand in a clear manner without being too harsh.

If a tree falls…soon the whole forest has fallen

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Last Wednesday I watched Marshall Curry’s documentary If a Tree Falls. I went in not knowing anything about the movie and it immediately grabbed my attention. It was very well done and painted a problematic picture of how nature is treated by big corporations only looking to maximize their profit. While I have known in the back of my head for a long time that fighting for nature’s right is hard and complicated, I honestly had no idea just how bad it could be. In the movie, it is shown how policemen torture peaceful demonstrators by spraying pepper spray right into their eyes. The measures that both the police and some of the corporations shown in the movie took were completely out of line, and as I watched I could only imagine the intense frustration that must have built up in people like Daniel McGowan.

 

But then at the same time, you are constantly reminded of just how extreme the Earth Liberation Front’s response really was. Burning down buildings is illegal for good reason and as a viewer you get a look into the devastation that the owners of one fabric in particular felt. And that is why the movie was so gripping, there was no clear right or wrong in the individual people shown, just people who got stuck on different sides of an argument; and argument about the Earth which is possibly the most important argument we have to think about in these days. Interestingly, toward the end of the movie, both the Earth Liberation Front as well as the police hunting them down concluded that they could understand somewhat why the other side had acted the way they did.

 

At the end, Marshall Curry held a question and answer session where we learnt more about the process about making the movie. He told us that he is fascinated by contrast, specifically where your imagination doesn’t agree with reality. And that is why he wanted to make this documentary in the first place, because he knew Daniel McGowan and he also knew that his idea of a terrorist was nothing like Daniel. And that was what shocked me as well at the beginning of the documentary, how such a nice man could get caught up in such crimes and labeled a terrorist. But at the end of the movie, I no longer felt as surprised that he acted the way he did, because while it is far from the way I myself would have wanted to act, I could see that he did what he truly thought was right.

From Idea to Success in Business

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Last Thursday, I and a few other Rose scholars ate dinner and had a conversation with Michael Belkin, who is an entrepreneur and who created the app Distinc.tt. Distinc.tt is an app for people from the LGBT community of all ages, although it is by far mostly younger people who use it. I really think that it is a valuable tool, because it can be much harder for especially teenagers in the LGBT community to get in contact with each other and to form a platform of support. Many young people who have just come out do not even know other people in the LGBT community and obviously, finding one’s place in that community can be a great support. It did not start out as a platform for teenagers to meet though. A newspaper chose to highlight the fact that younger people were allowed on the app and that message really took off and all of a sudden the business plan that the company had spent a lot of time creating had to be changed, as the nature of the app was forever changed due to the press it received.

Michael told us that he started planning out his company while he was an undergraduate at Cornell. When asked about how he managed to balance schoolwork with building a company, he said that while it was hard, it was definitely worth it as he would have been a year or even two behind had he started after college. I found his persistence admirable, when he realized that this is what he wanted to do, he immediately enrolled in computer science classes at Harvard and began to build the app himself, even though he had no previous knowledge of app building. When asked if there is something he would do differently, he explained that it would have been easier if he had had a business partner from the beginning. That way someone else would have invested as much energy and time as he had and he would not have been not alone in striving to make things work.

I learned multiple things from this dinner and perhaps the most important is that you have to be flexible when you are creating a business. It might not turn out at all as you expected, but you can adapt to that and make some changes and reach something even better than you thought of.

The Story of Rose House

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I really enjoyed this event! I learnt a lot of things about Cornell and West Campus that I didn’t know before from listening to Professor Blalock. I especially found his story about Ezra Cornell fascinating. He was a farmer and he only went to school up until grade 3. But when he got into the telegraphing business he made a word for himself and became successful. And now his legacy lives on through Cornell.

 

Cornell, and especially West Campus have changed a lot throughout the years. The first building on West Campus was Founders Hall and the newest building Rose main. For a long time, housing on Cornell was not seen as very important, and the men were all living off-campus. The women, on the other hand, were seen as more delicate and in order to protect them even more, they lived on campus. Slowly, there was a shift though and residential housing began to be built on campus. All the freshmen live on North campus, but there wasn’t really a place for upperclassmen to go unless they wanted to live off-campus or join a fraternity or sorority. And that is why West is so important, because it offers a community for upperclassmen on campus.

 

What stood out to me during the event was the visit to the War Memorial room in Lyon Hall. I actually had no idea that the room was even there before this tour! Unfortunately, it has to stay locked nowadays because there used to be too much vandalism there. It was the secret society Quill and Dagger that raised the money to build the whole war memorial. And they still have their receptions at the very top of Lyon Hall. Apparently, the only elevator in all of the Gothic buildings on West is the elevator up to their secret room.

Below are some pictures of the War Memorial room:

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After the tour, we all went to Professor Blalock’s apartment and has sushi and desserts. He has a cute little dog whose name is Pepper and before the reception, when we were walking in the tunnel between Becker and Rose, he could hear us and started barking loudly.