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My niece got into Cornell University

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ponyo said:
They installed safety net to catch people because so many people were jumping off to their death. That alone should tell you something.

1920px-Thurston_Avenue_Bridge_Cornell_University.jpg


I thought about applying to Cornell back in the 90s. People warned me about the cold dark winters there and the depression/suicide. So I applied to Princeton and University of Pennsylvania instead. I was rejected at Princeton but was accepted at UPenn Wharton business school.


Weird comment but ok.
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It really says a lot about suicide attempts that a net like that would stop anyone. Since they could literally just jump off the net. But I think a lot of people the first attempt gets it out of their system and they seek help.
 
Cornell is a great school, I hope she does well. She is off to a great start.

NYU had a suicide issue at their library's huge open interior courtyard. They had a fence built that also incorporated artistic design elements into it so it didn't look like a suicide prevention fence.

High pressure schools have high pressure situations. It's a rare tragedy but stuff happens. Need to have good resources and trained staff to watch out for kids under too much stress
 
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Zorba said:
It really says a lot about suicide attempts that a net like that would stop anyone. Since they could literally just jump off the net. But I think a lot of people the first attempt gets it out of their system and they seek help.
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I watched a show about suicide once. Professionals have long claimed that a strong deterrent to suicide is to make the quick fatal methods less accessible. They cited in England, (where most firearms are illegal) one of the main methods of suicide was to swallow a handle full of ibuprofen. They changed the law there to require ibuprofen to be sold only in blister packs and the overall suicide rate plummeted. Just the couple of minutes to punch the pills out of blister packs versus pouring them out of a bottle was enough to save a lot of lives.

Also I would venture to guess every college (high pressure or not) has a suicide problem and always have had.
 
Thump553 said:
I watched a show about suicide once. Professionals have long claimed that a strong deterrent to suicide is to make the quick fatal methods less accessible. They cited in England, (where most firearms are illegal) one of the main methods of suicide was to swallow a handle full of ibuprofen. They changed the law there to require ibuprofen to be sold only in blister packs and the overall suicide rate plummeted. Just the couple of minutes to punch the pills out of blister packs versus pouring them out of a bottle was enough to save a lot of lives.

Also I would venture to guess every college (high pressure or not) has a suicide problem and always have had.
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This data is ubiquitous. Town Gas in England. Guns in the US. Etc. Make suicide less ridiculously easy and numbers plummet.
 
Yeah. it seems odd that Cornell/Ithaca is picked out as a "cold, dark, and lonely" place. It's not that far North. And wouldn't you kinda know what you're getting into by even applying there as far as winter weather?
 
Thump553 said:
I watched a show about suicide once. Professionals have long claimed that a strong deterrent to suicide is to make the quick fatal methods less accessible. They cited in England, (where most firearms are illegal) one of the main methods of suicide was to swallow a handle full of ibuprofen. They changed the law there to require ibuprofen to be sold only in blister packs and the overall suicide rate plummeted. Just the couple of minutes to punch the pills out of blister packs versus pouring them out of a bottle was enough to save a lot of lives.

Also I would venture to guess every college (high pressure or not) has a suicide problem and always have had.
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Yup, I've read many places the reason boys have a higher suicide rate than girls is because they use more effective methods and it's rare to make two serious attempts.

They were never publized much, but I knew of multiple suicides at the state university I went to. It's a very hard time of life for a lot of people.
 
Spacehead said:
Yeah. it seems odd that Cornell/Ithaca is picked out as a "cold, dark, and lonely" place. It's not that far North. And wouldn't you kinda know what you're getting into by even applying there as far as winter weather?
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I got offered a big scholarship to go to Penn State for grad school. Visited in March, saw the big piles of snow and said fuck that.
 
lxskllr said:
I guess I'm the only one that thinks cold, dark, and lonely sounds amazing :^D

Congrats Mai!
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I hate cold weather and the short daylight. It really depresses me and makes me not want to do anything but just stay in bed. I know this now, but I didn't know when I was young and applying to colleges. Having grown up in GA, I didn't know how to dress in layers or how to deal with the face numbing cold winds and dark dreary days. I like visiting but you couldn't pay me to live up north. I couldn't wait to leave.
 
What I recently wrote elsewhere...

Shit... Today's the winter solstice. That means the bad ol sun's gonna be spending more time around, molesting my eyes, and making me hot. I'll be back to making grass shorter in no time :^(
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:^D
 
Spacehead said:
Yeah. it seems odd that Cornell/Ithaca is picked out as a "cold, dark, and lonely" place. It's not that far North. And wouldn't you kinda know what you're getting into by even applying there as far as winter weather?
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Having been there a bunch of times I can attest that it's actually a beautiful place as is much of upstate NY. (especially if you love nature)

4572-inset-full-1.jpg


To be fair, note that if you hate cold weather and snow it might not be the place for you but otherwise there are a butt-ton of far worse places to live in America.
 
I went to Berkeley and Stanford, Oxford and a number of other universities and came out as stupid as when I went in. At Berkeley you can park and walk to a nice Pizza place and the tower at Standford is a nice place to take relatives. Oxford, I don't remember very well having visited there a very long time ago while hitching though Europe.
 
Moonbeam said:
I went to Berkeley and Stanford, Oxford and a number of other universities and came out as stupid as when I went in. At Berkeley you can park and walk to a nice Pizza place and the tower at Standford is a nice place to take relatives. Oxford, I don't remember very well having visited there a very long time ago while hitching though Europe.
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Visit to Stanford back in March 2017 pretty much changed my life. I took my daughter to visit Stanford and afterwards we stopped at shopping center in Palo Alto to eat. There was Tesla showroom there so we spent some time in the store checking out the Model S and X. That was my first experience with Tesla vehicles and what I saw and experienced that day really impressed me. I still remember the nice sales associate lady who helped me in the store and showed me the features of the vehicles. That Tesla showroom visit in Palo Alto left a lasting impression on me and a year later, I bought my first shares of Tesla stock and the rest is history.


HhEMgZkh.jpg
 
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ponyo said:
Visit to Stanford back in March 2017 pretty much changed my life. I took my daughter to visit Stanford and afterwards we stopped at shopping center in Palo Alto to eat. There was Tesla showroom there so we spent some time in the store checking out the Model S and X. That was my first experience with Tesla vehicles and what I saw and experienced that day really impressed me. I still remember the nice sales associate lady who helped me in the store and showed me the features of the vehicles. That Tesla showroom visit in Palo Alto left a lasting impression on me and a year later, I bought my first shares of Tesla stock and the rest is history.
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Sadly the only time I ever think about money is when I want to buy something. Buying stock sounds to me like work. My folks read me the Aesop's fables about the grasshopper and the ants and I chose the fiddle.
 
Spacehead said:
Yeah. it seems odd that Cornell/Ithaca is picked out as a "cold, dark, and lonely" place. It's not that far North. And wouldn't you kinda know what you're getting into by even applying there as far as winter weather?
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It's in the snow belt. Not as bad as Buffalo, but it can get slammed.
 
200+ inches a year - yikes! True story- my BIL was born and raised in the south, had his first experience of winter at the Air Force Academy. He then did graduate work at Rochester, starting during what was one of their worst winters ever.
 
ponyo said:
Visit to Stanford back in March 2017 pretty much changed my life. I took my daughter to visit Stanford and afterwards we stopped at shopping center in Palo Alto to eat. There was Tesla showroom there so we spent some time in the store checking out the Model S and X. That was my first experience with Tesla vehicles and what I saw and experienced that day really impressed me. I still remember the nice sales associate lady who helped me in the store and showed me the features of the vehicles. That Tesla showroom visit in Palo Alto left a lasting impression on me and a year later, I bought my first shares of Tesla stock and the rest is history.


HhEMgZkh.jpg
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This is a good story that reminds me of a piece I heard on Radiolab on NPR about how a lot of success in many cases has a lot to do with a lot of luck - be at the right place at the right time type of stuff. Had to have a daughter, had Stanford as an option, chose it as a place to visit, happened to go to a Tesla showroom, a showroom that was apparently very well run, with a memorable salesperson. All those factors not there=no life changing event.

A lot of it is discussed in the context of this book called Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, which was quite well received. The podcast got into a couple things I remember, from the cutoff age for hockey players in Canada having a distinct relationship to success in the hockey leagues - all the way to Bill Gates himself. And Bill Gates has pretty much verified the author's take on his success. Gladwell opines that Gates was in the right place at the right time at an elite private school in the Seattle area that had a special computer program at a very early stage in their introduction into classrooms for kids of that age. And Gates has talked about this - no Lakeside School would mean no Microsoft - he said not only did that school get especially early access to computers, but the faculty there was keen on letting students tinker on their own and did not tie them down with lots of rules and regulations, really letting their minds roam with computers. He also met Paul Allen there, the co-founder of Microsoft. Now this is not to say that without the school Gates would not be successful in something else, but it was fundamental to his success. And the author of this book in no way does not take into account hard work - in fact he says a key fundamental to success in many endeavors is the 10,000 hour rule, put in that many hours so it becomes so instinctive to you can really help equate into success.

Radiolab podcast link:

Secrets of Success

Robert and Malcolm Gladwell duke it out over questions of luck, talent, passion and success.
www.wnycstudios.org www.wnycstudios.org

Wiki page on Outliers:

en.wikipedia.org

Outliers (book) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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