I really love art museums and art history. It was very interesting to analyze these works of art that were also very unique and unusual; I hadn’t seen any of them before. Historicizing art not only makes me appreciate the art and the artist more, it’s also just really fun. It’s like a mystery where all of the clues are right in front of us. It’s really interesting to think that meaning encoded in a piece of art by its artist might be forgotten or lost forever, or never fully understood. This is why I like movies like the Da Vinci Code!
Author Archives: ksl87
Fear of failure
Shirley mentioned that when she went to college, she was able to go very young and work her way through with inexpensive fees. I was very impressed by how it made her more confident about going to grad school, because she didn’t have to worry so much about success: if she didn’t make it in academia, she knew how to find other work. This is something that I worry about quite a bit. At the moment I want to go to grad school, but looking around at what my peers are doing and what other grad students seem to have accomplished I’m very worried that I won’t make it in that world. The prospect of spending so much time only to fall short is very scary to me. Maybe I should try to follow Shirley’s path to some extent and start working a part-time job that’s completely unrelated to my academic interests, just so that I get that experience and lose some of my fear of failure.
Humanities lab
The law clinic that Angela talked about seemed like a really powerful experience to me. I’ve never studied law but I can say that in physics, tangible experiments makes the material much more and comprehensible and accessible. It seems like an adaptation of the labs that exist in STEM classes to humanities and social science. For me, this was one of the difficulties in political classes: unlike literature it wasn’t creative and unlike physics it was very intangible to me. I might look for classes like this in later semesters when fulfilling my distribution requirements. I also was intrigued by the fact that these clinics work on real cases. I can imagine how impactful that clinic would be to not only get first-hand experience but to really make a difference in someone’s life, even as an undergrad.
The Cornell landscape
Todd and Andy talked about the importance of natural areas at Cornell and connecting with the land around them. This was something that I never really appreciated until I got here. I grew up in New Jersey, but since my brother lives in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time in the city. I guess being there a while you get used to the cityscape more than the trees. When I came to Cornell, things were kind of a shock. I’d never been in such a vast nature landscape. I guess that should’ve been expected, but in just one year I’ve really connected with the land around me. The landscape of the school feels welcoming, making me feel at home even during the most stressful parts of the semester.
College is a new place
Laura and Christa talked a bit about how they enjoy working with college-aged young adults who are developing independence and starting to explore themselves and their interests for the first time. I have been experiencing this first hand. When I came to college I didn’t really expect just how much I would learn, how hard I would work, or how my interests would diverge. My parents gave me a lot of independence when I was in high school and I didn’t really expect there to be much of a transition. But when I got to college I was surprised by being on my own. My parents had given be independence in terms of not placing a lot of restrictions on me, but this was the first time that I was really acting as my own person and looking at my own interests. Just being in a new environment where I wasn’t talking to them as frequently made me realize that I might not be the same person that I had imagined myself to be in high school.
Career or a side-project
I was interested in the slight difference between the career advice from Jason and Sean. Sean talked about taking jobs one at a time, picking things that seemed fun and just seeing where they go. He mentioned his “biggest failure” was not getting tenure at Penn, but he ended up finding a good home at Cornell. In essence: make your work what you like doing. Jason didn’t say that he disliked his job, but he did say that he found his volunteer work more rewarding and more important to him. To me it seemed like these were opposites and I’ve often wondered which of these paths I should aim to take: make my passion a personal project or a career. One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed Cornell is that I can make some of my side passions into something that I can spend time on academically. For example, this semester I was able to take a course in digital fashion design alongside my major physics and math courses. In college I can do these both, but I’m worried that after I graduate I’ll be forced to choose between these two options.
The right place for me
I connected with the discussion at the beginning about finding a path in college and looking for a career. Ryan and Ken both came to their jobs in indirect ways and I think its inspiring to see someone else taking a roundabout path. When I was younger I was interested in going into literature or creative writing, but as I got older I felt this pressure to do something more industrial and STEM-related. I decided to do engineering and went to college for one year in an engineering school but once I got there I realized that I was more interested in math and science over the practical parts of a degree. I ended up transferring to Cornell to study physics. In some sense I think I came back to my creative roots. The academic side of physics feels more free and creative than the engineering that I would’ve done. That being said I still worry about changing plans so much that I won’t have time to follow a path to a meaningful in depth, but hearing Ken and Ryan talk about how they ended up in a successful place makes me realize that I don’t have to worry about a final career path so early. For now I’ll just float around taking the classes I’m interested in and eventually I’ll end up in the right place for me.