Last week Wednesday, I attended the Rose Cafe with guest speaker Dan Schwarz. Dan Schwarz is a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences here at Cornell. The talk focused on Professor Schwarz’s book How to Succeed in College and Beyond. Professor Schwarz gave tips on how to be a good student as well as how to navigate college life.

One of the topics that he touched on was the Cornell Greek life. Professor Schwarz believes that fraternities create a type of ‘hive mind mentality’ within the fraternity. What I mean by this is that whenever there is an opinion, everyone in the fraternity agrees with that opinion because no one wants to go against the grain. Personally, I think that this is just a generalization about fraternity life. There are both pros and cons when joining a fraternity and each person just has to weigh them accordingly. I chose not to join a fraternity here at Cornell because I am on a varsity sports team and all my extra time outside of class goes to playing tennis. I also really enjoy the privacy that west campus gives me.

Another topic that Professor Schwarz talked about was choosing classes based on Professors rather than topics. What he means is that he suggests that you take classes from really good professors. Professor Schwarz said that the really good professors will be the ones who will care about you and will be the ones who will be able to write you good letters of recommendation if they are asked to. Being a junior, I have taken classes with professors who care about you and classes with professors who do not really care about you and I can tell you that it makes a huge difference. Having interesting professors makes you look forward to going to class and look forward to talking with them outside of class.