The Thesis Pledge
I originally published this as a Twitter thread in response to this New York Times article about how Cornell seniors feel about leaving campus to isolate themselves from the Coronavirus pandemic, but in the interest of ~putting my writing out there~, I decided to publish it here as a standalone piece. I’m v nervous about this…
Thoughts evoked in an alumnus by Annie Correal’s fantastic piece about Cornell seniors, “College in the Coronavirus Era”, a thread:
The piece explores the melancholy felt by students who are leaving campus for the remainder of the semester. Some seniors will perhaps never return.
My sister is currently a senior at Cornell. She and her friends, along with many other seniors have chosen to stay in Ithaca, off campus, for the time being. To be together.
I am cooped up at home in Mumbai with my parents, one of whom went to Cornell, too. We read the piece together and basically wept.
We each thought of our last semester as undergrads there. When I was a senior on the Hill, in 2017, I was writing a thesis about how technology influenced privacy law in America between the 1880s and the 1970s.
When my roommates and I returned from our Spring Break road trip in the Southwest in April, the 2 of us who were writing theses realized we were well behind, and they were due in 6 weeks.
We resolved not to go out to parties, not to drink, not to do anything fun for the remaining 6 weeks till we felt we were on top of our senior theses.
We joined forces with 2 other friends, and the 4 of us got into a rigid regiment of thesis work. Between us we were writing about Multiple Sclerosis, Middle Eastern Art, the Retributive justification of Punishment and Technology and Privacy.
One of us knew the code (5948 or maybe 5984 though its changed now😞) to a locked classroom in the new Klarman Hall, so we would go there after class every afternoon and squat till the wee hours.
We experimented with several study techniques, the most memorable being “pomodoros”. 25 minutes of work followed by a 5 minute break. Repeat for 6 pomodoros then take a longer break.
We would work for 25 minutes then project University Challenge, an insanely difficult British College Bowl-esque quiz show, for 5 minutes onto the classroom’s monitor.
Accounts vary wildly between the 4 of us on whether this was productive or not.
Sometimes, friends, significant others would join us, sometimes it was just the 4 of us.
But for us, this weird deprivation from usual senior year rituals wasn’t forced on us by any disease boogeyman, it was entirely self-imposed.
We had such a ridiculous sense of religion about our 6-week Thesis Pledge. We took a comical pleasure in keeping ourselves from drinking and senior-yearing, especially because we were doing it together. Some of my best college memories are from this time.
Senior Spring is that cherished time in college where you really get to exploit the resources (be they social or academic) you have cultivated over the last 3 and a half years to do whatever you want. For us it was to write lengthy papers on esoteric topics that nobody would read
But once we all finished our papers, we of course got to walk with our class, got to wear caps and gowns. Got to go out for fishbowls one last time. We had been free to do that the whole time.
I know the piece was not for us alumni, but I guess I am just thankful to have had a time at the end of college that I can look back on so fondly (and immensely privileged to have had one at all). And this makes me really feel for the current seniors.
We looked up from reading the piece at home, and wrote to my sister that we would do our best, as a family, to try and make up what little we could of her compromised senior Spring and graduation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/nyregion/cornell-university-coronavirus.html
