Sometimes — more often than I’d like to admit — I open my Google Calendar and feel a flicker of anxiety. The colors stack on top of each other: red for class, blue for meetings, green for work, yellow for everything else I’ve promised to squeeze in. I scroll to tomorrow and try to imagine myself moving through it all — like being alert at 9 a.m., articulate at 4 p.m. and enthusiastic at 8 p.m. By the time I’ve rehearsed the day in my head, I’m already exhausted and extremely overwhelmed.
It’s easy to assume that Cornell’s rigor only lives in the classroom. I mean, we are attending an Ivy League institution, so our academics will be challenging. Our never-ending prelims are exhausting, the readings are long and the walk to the Engineering Quad, especially during the winter months, feels like a personal test of resilience. But more often than not, it’s not the lecture hall that makes a day feel impossible, but rather everything wrapped around it.
Classes, on average, last 50 to 75 minutes. A meeting, on the other hand, is rarely just a meeting. It’s the prep beforehand, the countless Slack messages (that I can never keep up with) and worst of all, the follow-up Google Doc after. It’s sprinting with a protein bar in hand from your 4:10 p.m. class in Klarman Hall to your bi-weekly G-body meeting in Duffield Hall that starts at 4:30 p.m., rehearsing what you’re about to say, while still thinking about what you just left. It’s the accumulation of club E-board weekly meetings, project teams, research, part-time jobs and the subtle but constant pressure to be visible in all of them.
Cornell doesn’t just encourage involvement — it quietly celebrates over-involvement. I’ll speak briefly from my personal experience, as I am in 10 clubs and trying to balance the workload of my double major and minor. Still, I have this lingering feeling that I am not doing enough. There is always another committee to join, another leadership position to apply for, another meeting that promises to be the one that ‘really matters.’ When everyone around you is just as busy — or at least appears to be — productivity starts to feel like the only acceptable baseline. The bar keeps rising, and somehow, no matter how full my schedule becomes, it never quite feels full enough.
And so our calendars swell with Google Calendars’ increasing color variations, like our own personal mosaics — intricate, crowded and carefully arranged to prove that every inch of space has been accounted for. Each new shade becomes a badge of productivity, a visual reassurance that we are in demand. But like any mosaic assembled too tightly, the beauty begins to blur. What once looked vibrant starts to feel overwhelming, the colors bleeding into one another until the picture is less about purpose and more about pressure; not because we can’t handle our coursework, but because we don’t want to miss out — on leadership, on community, on opportunity.
We say yes to more because we care. We say yes because everyone else seems to be managing it well. We say yes because Cornell is full of ambitious people doing ambitious things who are off to live their ambitious lives.
But ambition has a cost. When meetings fill every open hour, there’s little room left for thinking, for rest, for the slow work of actually absorbing what we’re here to learn. That little, very rare chance to sit alone in my room and do absolutely nothing for more than an hour? That is what makes me realize that the meetings at Cornell are much harder than the classes. I feel almost euphoric when I get time to relax — like I’ve stumbled into a luxury I didn’t realize I’d been missing.
None of this is to say that clubs and organizations are the problem. They are the heart of this campus. They’re where friendships form, ideas turn into initiatives and students practice leadership in real time. They’re what make Cornell feel alive. The issue isn’t involvement itself. It is the quiet competition to maximize it.
Maybe the harder question isn’t how to survive a packed calendar, but why we feel compelled to fill it so completely. What would it look like to treat empty space not as wasted time, but as something necessary? What if we valued depth over breadth — staying longer in fewer rooms, instead of rushing through many?
The next time I open my Google Calendar and feel that familiar whiff of anxiety, I will try to pause before adding another block of color. Because at Cornell, the challenge isn’t just keeping up with our classes. It’s learning how to protect our time in a culture that constantly asks for more of it.
Maya Rothbard is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at msr295@cornell.edu.
