FROM THE EDITOR | Welcome Home

I’m not going to lie — I have no recollection of reading or even seeing the Freshman Issue of The Cornell Daily Sun the summer before I got to Ithaca. So the fact that you’re here on this page means you’re already ahead of the game when it comes to this Cornell stuff.

Your next four or so years will be — in no particular order — exciting, exhausting, rewarding, disgusting, absolutely exhilarating, terribly mundane and a whole host of other things as well.

As an incoming freshman, you may feel that the world, and Cornell, are moving you more than you are moving them. But the truth is, everyone here — from the soon-to-be roommate you met during Cornell Days, to the professor who will somehow make you fall in love with labor economics, to Martha Pollack herself — feels that way most days.

And while Cornell is a big place with big personalities (and big hills…get ready to have the best calves of your lives), it is most crucially your place. The choices you make in your time here will have as great an effect on this university as does its entire 153-year history. Cornell isn’t the same place it was four years ago, and in many ways it will be almost unrecognizable in another four; it’s your choice to decide in what ways that will be.

So don’t be afraid to say “hi” to that person you see every day, or to enroll in astrophysics even though you suck at math, or protest on the Quad and occupy the president’s office. Start a club, run for city council, get super trashed and host a chicken wing date night with the rest of your freshman floor in Donlon (D5ever, shoutout Rohit, Kitty and Edan).

Cornell is your sandbox, so get ready to build.

— J.S.K.R.