Inside Summer College 2009

Ben	Geetsikha
Ian	Jason
Jeremy	Mary
Trey

Inside Summer College 2008

Ashley	Ben
Drue	Elizabeth
Josh	Kaitlin
Kristin	Laura
Maia	Paige
Ruben

Inside Summer College 2007

Andrea	Brian
Brooke	Casey
Charleen	Dave
Erica	Farah
Hayley	Koyuki
Katie	Rachelle
Tyrone

Inside Summer College 2006

Lia	Erik
Hannah	Zaid
EJ	Jordana

see also

• Slide show
• Summer College campus photo tour
• Summer College videos
• The Summer Times Student Newspaper

Charleen

I live in a small town of only 60,000 in the southernmost part of Texas called Victoria, and I just finished off my junior year at Memorial High School. I'm 17, and I can't wait to explore and see more of the world. My dad has always said that I'd never truly find my place until I've traveled a bit and realized how great the world and its people really are. Cornell is the beginning of that. I play flute and piano and am very active in my school's music programs, but never had much more artistic experience than that, so "Introduction to Architecture" is definitely going to be foreign to me. I hope my experiences this summer help me decide what I should do with the rest of my life. If I'm really cut out to go into architecture full-time, I'll find out over these six weeks. Other than music, I enjoy volleyball and competitive swimming, hanging out with friends, and spend a lot of my time working to save up for college. I know these six weeks are going to be incredible, and not just because of the courses and professors. I'm really looking forward to getting a taste of campus life and meeting lots of new people!

Journal entries

6/31/2007
Well, its been a week since I set foot on Cornell's huge campus. I arrived on Friday night and stayed at a hotel until registration Saturday morning. To tell the truth, Mary Donlon Hall, where all the six-week students are housed, isn't all that amazing... aesthetically. But I guess the rooms are alright to live in. The community is really diverse here. You can't go anywhere on campus without hearing 5 different languages in one place. I'm not going to lie, architecture's pretty difficult. Most of us usually end up spending most of our time at the studio in Rand Hall sketching and making endless sketch models and projects out of chipboard and glue. I've never actually had any studio or art experience, so I feel a little further behind the ones that have had that opportunity, but it's a lot of fun nevertheless. I've made so many friends in architecture and since we usually spend most of our time in the studio, we've gotten really close over this past week. Sometimes, late at night or really early in the morning when we're dragging ourselves around the studio trying to finish our projects, it feels like we've been here for months and months, making these variations of chipboard cubes over and over and over again. Thinking 'outside the box' and having to formulate imaginary dimensions in your mind is actually harder than other people think, and though all the other students at Summer College have the time to walk down to Collegetown or take the bus to the mall, we (the architecture students) stay in the studio -- even on the weekends -- and perfect our designs. But it's not mindless, boring work. It's fun, and it makes the time go by faster. Even to the extent where it seems like we don't have enough of it. I know these next five weeks are going to get even more difficult, but I'm looking forward to every frustrating, time-consuming, and enjoyable moment of it.

7/6/07
During the first week, at times my friends and I would feel like we'd been at Cornell for months, but this past week went by incredibly fast. Independence Day was a lot of fun because the TAs let us off easy and didn't give us much work to do over the holiday. But of course, somehow, most of us ended up at the studio after dinner and stayed until 10:30 (when the TAs kick us out to meet curfew) with only each other and the birds that live in the rafters to keep us company. We started graphic design this week, and it's pretty cool how you can create the projects that took us a week to make in 30 minutes on the screen. We've been practically living at the studios since our coursework has been getting more and more difficult. So far, the best memories in the studio are ordering Chinese food for dinner since we didn't have the time (or the energy) to walk all the way to Appel Commons for dinner, pushing each other on rolling stools down the walkway that divides the studio into little cubicles, and climbing up the three flights of stairs of Rand Hall (NOT). The funny thing is, you could ask any student in Summer College when the deadline for an architecture project is, and they'll tell you right off the bat. At first, the others said that we 'archies' complained too much and that we were taking our work way too seriously. After about 3 days, their attitudes changed... now they feel sorry for us! I didn't hear this until a few days ago, but apparently the students in other programs are calling ours 'archiTORTURE'. I know it's tough, but I still have a good time. The professors are really cool, and yesterday, we watched a really funny video on behavioral space during the 'Concepts of Space and Architecture' lecture. I like this program a lot, and I can't wait until we get our new assignment at 4 p.m. today.

7/14/07
I'm. So. Tired. It was a long week and I have class again starting a fresh week tomorrow morning. I have a trip to Rochester with all the other architecture students to look forward to on Tuesday (which includes seeing a church by Louis Kahn!), and more coursework that the professors keep on hinting about where we might get to actually design a BUILDING (Get that? Not CUBES... BUILDINGS). We've been doing different types of cubes and lots of freehand/drafting drawings all the way up until now. I'm so glad that I'll get to start doing what I came here to do. We had a fascinating lecture on Friday about green architecture. I hope to specialize in that particular branch of architecture, so it was really exciting to meet and talk to the professor who teaches the environmental classes that are in conjunction with the architecture department.

On Tuesday, we celebrated a friend's birthday at a Korean restaurant in Collegetown and we even went to go play laser tag in Ithaca on the weekend. Even though we had our preliminary exam on Wednesday, my friends and I always manage to find time to hang out with our other friends from other programs and to go out and have a little fun. I can't believe that summer college is already half over.

7/28/07
I haven't found time to write for the last couple of weeks. Architecture's starting to get extremely frenzied and stressful. We sat our final exam yesterday morning, which wasn't as bad as I'd expected it to be, considering the "study group" in my room the night before ended up doing more talking and snacking than actually studying. Our final design project is due this Wednesday at 8 pm and the final review is the next day. So most of us are putting a lot of hours in at the studio and outside of it, trying to get the models and drawings finished for each of the phases that the TAs set for us. I can't believe that this is the last week that I'll spend here at Cornell. To tell the truth, I really don't want to go home -- back to living at home and going to high school every day. A group of us are going to go out to eat after the deadline on Wednesday to celebrate and relax before the reviews the next day. There are guest critics coming in, so it's going to be pretty intense, but at least we'll have fun the night before. Speaking of intense, the architecture students have been spending so much time in the studio these past few days, some of them have actually strung up sheets to make hammocks so they can take naps. And a sudden bow-and-arrow-making trend started when some of the guys were goofing off. Every ten minutes, you can see an arrow made of basswood sticks with a ball of cushy sketching paper and drafting tape on the end of it fly by... Friday night, when we should've been working on our models, there was a mini bow-and-arrow war and, after that, about ten of us took our cutting boards and slid down the steep hill outside of Rand Hall in the wet grass. I'm really going to miss these times when this week is over...

8/18/07
Things I Will Never Forget From Cornell:

• Walking along the gorges to Ithaca Commons
• Strawberry smoothies at Collegetown Bagels
• Playing soccer in the dark
• Watching 3 friends attempt to down "The Fat Chick" (it's this huge chicken burger) at Benchwarmers in 30 minutes so they could get a free t-shirt
• Having bow-and-arrow wars in the studio late at night with bows and arrows that we made out of spare scraps of wood and metal and string and with balls of sketch paper on the ends... rather than working on our projects
• Learning to look at buildings in a completely different way
• Having Korean friends for the first time (I'm the only one at my high school back home!)
• Taking the bus everywhere and freaking out when we realized that we were on the wrong one... then having to lug our groceries halfway across campus
• The amazing lectures that I actually looked forward to
• The day a bunch of the students dressed up like our professor
• The toga party we had for my friend's birthday
• Arguing with friends as to whether or not this or that was a conceptual or perceptual space (we'll never look at buildings the same way)
• The awesome exhibition of our work on the last day
• Ordering ice cream and Chinese food at all hours of the night
• The Korean restaurants in Collegetown (and getting one of my friends hooked on Korean food)
• Seeing one our TAs in a kimono at the exhibition
• Sliding down the hill outside the studio on our cutting boards
• The CAVE
• Lugging our supplies up and down the many hills that make up Cornell's campus
• The bipolar weather
• Pushing each other on rolling chairs down the hallways of the studio
• The final goodbye

It's now been two weeks since I returned from Cornell, and to tell the truth, life seems mediocre in comparison to the times I had at Summer College. The last couple of days on campus, I dreaded packing up and going home (I ended up packing up until the minute before my taxi arrived). I wish that these six weeks could be extended to years and years on end. Architecture was pretty difficult (I'm supposed to get my evaluation any day now!), but I had so much fun doing it that all those long hours were definitely worth it. I know that during the next year that I have left, living at home is going to be kind of a drag since I'll be reliving Summer College over and over in my head (yes, I keep dreaming about it), but at least I've decided that I truly want to pursue architecture. You never know, maybe next year I will be able to return to Cornell's campus with its bipolar weather and hilly terrain that my friends and I always complained about, and hopefully I'll be able to reunite with some of the people I made friends with there. I'll never let go of the memories I made there...