Author Archives: Ivan

Making the most out of feedback

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The Rose cafe with Dr. Cynthia Hill revolved around how to get the most of the feedback you get from professors.

One topic Dr. Hill focused on was that getting feedback should be treated as the start of a conversation. Even if it the final draft of a paper, the feedback can help guide you when you are writing the next paper in the class. I can relate this to an experience I had in a philosophy class I took earlier in my Cornell career. I remember writing a paper that relied too strongly on economic arguments, and not on the topics we discussed in class. I was trying to shove too many lens into one paper. One mistake people make is taking criticism to mean that they just have to shape the paper more to professor’s liking just because that’s what he/she like. I think this is the wrong mindset to have. The professor has a lot of years of experience in the field, and he/she is trying to help acquaint you with that field. In my case, I focused more on making my philosophical arguments stronger in the next paper. This, of course, helped my grade, but even I could see that it was a much better paper than the jumbled one I handed in before.

The conversation did make me miss having classes outside computer science and math which I have primarily taken these past 2 semesters. There really isn’t the same opportunity for a conversation regarding a project. In particular, the comp sci department is so overfilled that having an ongoing conversation with a professor is much tougher. In general though, the feedback cycle lends its to the liberal sciences more than STEM, at least at the undergrad level.

Even still, I do get feedback from TAs in my computer science classes, especially when I do something wrong. Like Dr. Hill emphasized, it is important to really study that feedback. The TAs usually identify a weak point you have in the material. It is important to address these weak points instead of letting them pile up and failing your exam.

Politics in 2017

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The first Rose Cafe of the semester was a shift from the cafes I’ve been accustomed to. Instead of a lecture, it was largely a conversation. It focused on the recent developments in US politics.

One of my favorite points that Professor Enns talked about was how quick people are to accept their parties’ position on a topic. One reason is that people don’t care as much for some issues as others, so they might as well take their parties’ position on everything. I feel like this is counter-productive. It is hard enough to have a discussion about an issue when someone doesn’t understand the opposition’s argument, but it is even harder when a person doesn’t understand the argument for a position either. I think this phenomenon also happens because people will assign a whole list of positions to you as soon as you reveal preference for a candidate of either party. At some point people just adopt a position since they are always assumed to have it anyways.

Another interesting topic that was touched upon was people having double standards for their party vs the other party. Professor Enns discussed how it is important to recognize whether you dislike something based on principle or because it is being done by the other party. One example of this was how much Republicans were decried for obstruction for many years, but now Democrats in office face strong pressure to oppose everything proposed by the Republicans. It is a valid argument to say the situation is vastly different; however, Democrats now see obstruction in government as a valid, even admirable, tactic. This is why I think they should’ve spent more time trying to gain support for their ideas instead of arguing that Republicans were unfairly blocking Obama’s agenda and that obstruction was ruining government.

Violence and Twists

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I was excited to see that Fight Club was the first movie being shown for movie night. It is a movie that’s reputation precedes it. It is nearly two decades old, but I’d taken great care to make sure that I went in without any spoilers. I will stick to analyzing a few small aspects of the film since there are literally books written about the film.

After the film Professor Hill discussed some of the cinematography choices in the film. He highlighted how the background will often contrast what is being said in the film. That was something I hadn’t noticed, but I think it is very important to understanding the underlying themes.

The fight scenes were some of my favorite scenes. They were executed very well, and I would disagree that they were gratuitous. I heard a few comments after the film that the violence was over top. I think that is one of the places that Fight Club showed it’s age. Compared to something like Game of Thrones, the fight scenes were downright subdued. Even the most violent scene between Norton and the underlying he is jealous of won’t make a top 10 list for violence in 2016. If a message of the movie depended on the amount of violence depicted, I think that message is a little lost watching it now.

In terms of the plot twist, the split personalities was given away a little too early for my liking. It was fairly obvious in the first few scenes of Marla in the house. Maybe keeping the plot twist a secret wasn’t the point of the movie, but I feel a little more mileage could’ve been gotten of the Pitt and Norton dynamic without the audience knowing they were split personalities.

The actual plot twist for me was the explosions to me. I was expecting for the other members of fight club to be figments of Norton’s imaginations. I am still not convinced that they aren’t. The whole theme of Norton fighting his true desires doesn’t seem to fit with him successfully destroying credit card companies. Norton seems to live in his world yet he is someone how able to successfully execute such a huge plan.

I can’t really go into dissecting the ending more than that since I still am trying to process all the themes from the movie.  The movie is still well worth a watch almost two decades after it initially premiered.