since last post, I had a great (eye-opening) experience in Las Vegas as the clock struck midnight on the New Year; I’ve also gone snowboarding with Erik at Mountain High. Devin left home to return to Berkeley early because of his cat allergies, an affliction that is becoming increasingly distressing to him when he returns to Mission Viejo. I went to Disneyland on my older brother’s annual pass (ho ho HO!) and visited Robert in North Hollywood after grabbing brunch with Taylor Wirth. After all these shenanigans, I returned to snowy Ithaca and conducted a lot of research in the quiescence of my office, enjoying the walks to and from campus and unseasonably warm weather.
My time here though has been anything but ordinary, shattering some opinions I previously held about my life as it stands. In general I have seen graduate school as a time of nominal change; certainly, I imagined, this would be the case compared with college. However, by four months from now I will lose four of my closest friends as they either end their graduate careers or decide to take a hiatus from research (and hence, Cornell). Two of these friends have been saying they’d leave since August; the other two I learned about within the past two weeks. This shift, the very core of my social life shedding spontaneously, has really disheartened me. This year has been nice because I’ve had a year of experiences with these friends to build upon. Now, I can’t help but feel like life will be a little empty next year.
What happened to nominal change in graduate school? What of the stability that was supposed to come with age? Clearly, this contention I previously held was just wrong. Graduate school is not certainty; at its core, it is still school. It is voluntary, costly (if not in money, then in work product and freedom), and like any other job it drops you in an environment that either suits you or doesn’t. It’s a different kind of evolution than undergrad; it is literally the transience of people and corresponding friendships.
After all is said and done, after this year is over, I will be losing close proximity to a broad spectrum of friends that stretches from master’s students in different colleges to even the most atomic of friendships I’ve formed since arriving at Cornell: to those in my own department. In tandem and quite separately I’ve been integrating into different areas of the campus. For instance, I recently was elected to be a member of the GPSA, hopefully bringing with it a commensurate increase in closeness to the rest of the members of the Assembly. I’m taking a course from the business school with a healthy cross-section from the rest of the graduate student community. In short, I’m trying to branch out socially, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but to which I felt considerable resistance as a first-year. Whether these friendships will lessen the pain of those friends leaving is yet to be discovered.
The complexity and relative impermanence of friendships here further convince me that college was an incredible and unique experience. I misread what is common versus uncommon outside of college, and am gradually overwriting my first impressions that were based on the undergraduate-like experience I was dropped into here at Cornell. Maybe this was what Professor Sachse was talking about when he said that the previous “undergrad-like” stage in my life was over, and that it’s now time to switch gears. More likely, I just wasn’t mentally ready for this impermanence all along.