The Typical Day of a Student at Cornell University

You may be a high schooler looking at the prospective colleges to apply to or trying to narrow down your list of potential colleges. Maybe, you are a student at Duke University or University of Rochester or even Tsinghua University in China—you name it—just curious about the lives of fellow collegiate students elsewhere. Whoever you are, we welcome you to the lives of two freshmen at Cornell University. Of course, not all freshmen are the same and these freshmen by no means represent the entire class nor each successive class of freshmen students. However, their lives are of great significance at Cornell and they are excited to share with you a day in their lives—a snippet of the wonderful journey they have embarked.

* I have changed the names of these students because they have the right to privacy in their daily lives.

A Day in the life of Marissa, a student the College of Arts and Sciences

8:00AM- Marissa wakes up in the morning to eat a quick breakfast and get ready for her classes. She is a very dedicated and ambitious government major.

8:30AM- She takes the bus to get to her 9AM French Discussion. In the mornings, she is usually just too tired to walk and prefers to save energy for her long day of classes and extracurriculars.

9:05AM- Discussion begins!

12PM- Marissa goes to her Rhetoric of Current Presidential Election class where they discuss (as the name of the class reveals) the current presidential election. Of course, this class only ran this year (and during the fall semester) because of the 2016 election.

1:15PM- Marissa heads to Trillium, her favorite eatery on campus, for lunch. She stays on central campus until 4PM doing homework and studying.

4:30PM- Student Health and Wellness meeting for the Student Assembly!

5:30PM- She attends the Cornell Democrats meeting; they typically have guest lecturers, talk about the presidential races, do campaigning, etc.

7:00PM- Marissa returns to North Campus and heads to dinner at a dining hall.

8:00PM- Home sweet home!…or home away from home! Marissa goes back to her dorm and showers. Her room is very comfy and decorated with pictures and lights so that she still feels at home even though she is a plane ride away.

8:30PM- She starts studying and doing homework. She would also set aside time to work on her own nonprofit organization, an excellent organization dedicated to helping needy children worldwide.

1:00AM- A long day is concluded with a sweet night’s sleep! Marissa says that her bed at Cornell is much more comfortable than her bed at home and she is so happy to be able to fall right to sleep as soon as her head hits the pillow.

A Day in the life of Elise, a student in the College of Engineering

8:00AM- Elise wakes up to her alarm to get ready for her first class of the day, a 9AM math lecture.

8:35AM- She enjoys waking up by walking to class. Even in bad weather conditions, she prefers walking over taking the bus because it wakes her up.

9:05AM- Math lecture begins. Elise claims that her professor does not erase the board…ever. Rather, he washes it.

11:00AM- After her physics lecture, Elise heads to a dining hall with a buddy from class to eat, destress, and maybe get a cup of coffee if she did not get enough sleep the night before.

12:00PM- End of lunch time. Elise has another hour before she has to head to class so she studies at either Olin or Uris library.

1:25PM- Computer Science lab!

2:30PM- She finishes CS lab and heads to physics lab. What she loves about physics lab is that although on her schedule it is 1 hour and 55 minutes long, students can leave early as long has the have completed the assigned lab work.

4:00PM- Elise completes lab and she heads to a library to do some work for an hour.

5:00PM-6:00PM- Society of Women Engineers Meeting!

6:30PM- Elise heads out to dinner with her roommates or a couple of friends. Dinner usually takes about an hour and a half because she usually ends up chatting for a very long time with her friends and people she runs into at the dining halls.

8:00PM- Elise returns to her dorm goes to take a shower and change into her pajamas, knowing she will probably not leave her dorm again.

8:30PM- Homework time! (Or, she admits, 85% of the time is spent actually doing homework and the other 15% chatting with her roommate and friends from home, watching YouTube videos, snacking, and doing miscellaneous things—all things unrelated to homework)

12:30AM- She gets ready for bed. According to Elise, the beds here are rather comfortable and not as terrible as many other college students living in dorm room claim their beds to be.