How many of your friends pride themselves on skipping class, only to lock themselves in study rooms with hoards of Take Note? Claim not to dig politics yet run for president of the Student Assembly? Scoff at the Wall Street Journal before getting the news from John Stewart? Rock out on a Thursday night, then watch the presidential debate on DVR the very next day?

Much as we might like to think we are — and much as I might claim we are in this column of mine — we Cornellians are not completely badass. Though we may pat ourselves on the back for our extreme procrastination and extensive tomfoolery, we’re at this Ivy League institution for a reason. While we may be able to party hard and get away with it, we are simply incapable of escaping our inner geeks. As such, we feel the perpetual need to compensate; if not only for the bragging rights we are eternally distracting ourselves from the dweebs within.

Hardwired to be high achievers, the perverse pleasure we find in closing the bars most nights of the week is reliably counterbalanced by über-impressive resumes and GPAs that make our peers at lesser institutions weep. While friends at the University of Arizona may have put us to shame over spring break, it wasn’t too tough to discount the wet t-shirt winners in the end, knowing precisely who won’t be ruling the world some day.

This phenomenon does not limit itself to our social lives, however. As we strive to prove ourselves here at Cornell as anything but students, we find ourselves engaging in activities we might never have known we cared about. There’s Miss Young Democrat, the Ivy Man and even that girl who swindled herself an Eclipse column. Whether voyaging to self-discovery, following our bliss or just trying to get laid, we students seem to feel an incessant need to prove ourselves as something other than students.

In this alternate universe we have created, we are continually asserting our non-academic individuality by way of activities, organizations and pointless positions. But does it even matter what we do here as long as we graduate? Sure, we juggled countless high school obligations, if only to list them on our college applications, but will any non-Conellian employer know what an ambassador actually does? While the insignia on our undergraduate degrees may be sufficient, we, for some reason, can’t get enough.

Despite contorting the truth so that we’re anything but “students first,” we seem to have some faint awareness of an existence beyond Cornell. Heck, maybe this concern for the future is the reason we’re all here in the first place…? Just kidding. The question is whether we’re ever really able to shut off our latent desire to be dweeby overachievers. And the answer is no.

For, at the end of the day, we chose to party here — here at Cornell where the temperatures hath no fury, no one can drive and the nearest real city is, well, Syracuse. Whether we consider ourselves jocks, stoners, emo kids or artsy souls, we’re all the same on the inside: big, happy losers. The library is a place of comfort, and most of us are completely unaware that Cornell even made the NCAA tournament last spring. The dialectic tension between our nerd-esque natures and aspirations for non-academic recognition is an innately Cornell anomaly. While we can’t escape the habits that got us here, we at least can distract ourselves from them.

As we go through our time here, continuing to figure out who we are and what we want, we can at least find some entertainment in the dorky things we do. Both disciplined and self-indulgent, we can trust that we’ll be able to make sense of ourselves by the time we leave this place. As for the mean time? Party hard, have fun and get your shit done: it’s the Cornell way.