Please, please help your son or daughter remember that being “average” at Cornell puts one into the top two to three percent of one’s generation and that being average overall means being good at some things and having a hard time with other things. In the end, learning how to think, how to set one’s own direction, and how to maintain one’s sense of self is worth the pain.
Students leaving home, where they are loved unconditionally, and high school, where they have been highly successful, need to prove competence and gain confidence in a new environment. They need to complete more work more independently and over longer periods of time than ever before; they need to develop new friendships, community connections, and relationships with faculty; they need to find their own niches at Cornell. This is a lot to do. But nearly all do it well, and most do it best on their own.
College work is more demanding intellectually than high school work, not just greater in amount. Strategies like memorizing or knowing one way to solve a particular kind of problem – strategies that worked well in high school – usually will not prove successful in college. Learning how to learn in new ways is stressful. If this takes some time and, in the meantime, grades on exams are lower than your student has ever seen, it can also take a toll on self-confidence. But almost all succeed sooner rather than later. However, let us point out an arithmetic certainty: only ten percent of them will earn grades that place them in the top ten percent of their class. Please remind your students that being “only average” at Cornell means being in about the top 2 to 3% of their generation (academically).
When students do not succeed at Cornell, the reason is virtually never that they are intellectually incapable of doing the work; something outside school gets in their way: immaturity, lack of motivation or discipline, mismatch with program, alcohol, illness, emotional problems, family or financial difficulties.
Finally, contrary to some parents’ fears and to students’ sometimes startling changes in appearance, students stay fundamentally the same during their college years. They grow up, become independent -- sometimes aggressively so -- and more interesting, they take on distinctive styles of self-presentation. But basic character and personality are not much altered. We sometimes ask seniors to read what they wrote about their academic and personal goals in their applications to college or in their applications to some program at the end of their freshman year. They usually get red in the face, smile at how they said things, and then admit that they still have the same basic goals. But they think about them and describe them very differently. What has happened is they have become more sophisticated, more tolerant of ambiguity; and they have become aware that the world can go on without them, while realizing how they can participate in the "real world" outside college.