Christina MacCorkle
Government, History and Robert S. Harrison College Scholar
Santa Barbara, Calif.
What is your main extracurricular activity and why is it important to you?
My main extracurricular activity has been being a writer and editor for the Cornell Daily Sun’s news section.
As a writer, I reported on topics such as student protests, curricular changes, changes in the student disciplinary processes and racial diversity in Greek Life. As part of my reporting, I got to interview students, faculty and administrators who often had diverging positions on topics and was challenged to present these viewpoints in a clear and concise article that would inform the Cornell community.
Reporting for the Sun made me a better writer and question-asker, but I also liked getting to learn about people’s experiences at Cornell that I would not have encountered in my own life as a student. As an editor, I spent one or two nights a week downtown at the Sun office working alongside other editors to publish the digital and lay out the physical copies of the paper. My time as an editor was meaningful mostly because of the other news editors and the managing editor. I came to really trust and admire the judgment of the other editors I worked with and was proud of the way we got better at working together throughout our term as a team. We also went on a trip to New York for a tour of the New York Times office, which was really cool.
My involvement in student journalism also led me to pursue opportunities to support the First Amendment from a legal and advocacy perspective. For more than a year, I was a remote intern with PEN America, where I tracked cases of writers-at-risk globally. I also began assisting the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic’s Local Journalism Project with matters relating to information access for local journalists.
Supervised by the project’s managing attorney, Heather Murray, and alongside other research assistants (who are also Sunnies), we have been working on a research project that investigates media access practices in prisons at the federal, state and county levels. It has been a challenging process keeping track of all the different public information processes at the state and county levels, but as a team, we were able to draft and file more than 50 public records requests in an attempt to get more data about the reality of media access to inmates.
What are the most valuable skills you gained from your Arts & Sciences education?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot given all the discussion happening around AI and entry-level job replacement. Certainly, the Arts & Sciences education has made me a stronger writer, a more articulate critical thinker and a better problem-solver. But in an age where artificial intelligence is also able to “think” and produce writing, I think the thing that is going to be more and more valuable is the ability to discern cogent arguments from specious ones.
Discussion-based classes have fostered this critical skill of discernment because they forced you to take intellectual ownership of your own unique process of inquiry and analysis.
In the two government seminar courses I’ve taken, both of which have been with Professor Richard Bensel, our comparisons of the assumptions various political theorists make helped me more effectively break down arguments made in political theory and consider their uses and limitations. In this process, I have also been challenged to consider my own positionality – to not only articulate what I think, but also question why I think what I think, essentially applying the process of critical analysis to evaluate and critique my own thought processes.
In a world (and job market) where AI can produce a lot of text, I think there will be a premium placed on the ability to evaluate and discern what is missing from the thinking processes that AI has to offer. I feel like the Arts & Sciences education has prepared me well to do just that.
What have you accomplished as a Cornell student that you are most proud of?
I’m probably most proud of the difficult and rewarding process that has been working on my thesis. I began thinking about the thesis when I joined the Robert S. Harrison College Scholar program, where I initially wanted to research and write about the impact of online platforms on political discourse.
But, as I took more classes and reflected upon which courses I enjoyed the most, I realized that I had really enjoyed English classes and, given my history and government majors, was specifically interested in the intersection between American literary and political history. My thesis topic came into focus when I began reading the ideas of literary critic Lionel Trilling, who saw the literary imagination as a resource to be deployed in service of cultivating a renewed liberalism that could combat the uncritical and totalizing force of Stalinism.
When I was looking through a literary magazine that he was associated with, I found that James Baldwin had published several of his famous essays in the magazine in the 50s, and wondered what it was about this specific intellectual culture that led Baldwin to publish some of his most famous essays, including “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone,” for an audience of white liberals.
The process of researching the thesis in the fall was challenging – I felt like I had never undertaken such a large project and that I was out of my depth. But I had a great advisor, Professor Lindsay Thomas in the literatures in English department, who kept me on track, guided me through the process of developing my half-baked ideas and opened my eyes to the way that writing can be a way of thinking, of finding out what you want to say.
As part of my thesis research, I visited two different archives in New York City. Ultimately, in my thesis, I attempt to recuperate what I argue is a serious and sustained textual conversation between Baldwin and Trilling about the potentials, failures and alternatives of attempting to use literary imagination to attain social knowledge in the early Cold War period.
Who or what influenced your Cornell education the most?
What has influenced my academic interest the most is probably my personal background. I grew up outside the U.S. as a U.S. citizen and sought to use the academic resources at Cornell to attempt to untangle the question of what it means to lay claim to American identity.
Attempting to answer this question led me across academic disciplines and historical time periods, from learning about the religiosity of early Puritan settlements to analyzing 20th century American literature, from examining key texts of the Black radical tradition to those of American conservative thought. What I’ve enjoyed most in these courses is seeing the way American thinkers and writers are constantly in conversation with each other, contesting and re-asserting what the American founding meant and how it should inform political activity in the present. What learning about U.S. history, politics and literature has revealed to me are the many unresolved paradoxes at the center of American thought, such as the question of who “the people” are and how they are authorized to act.
My interest in American politics also informed my decision to spend my spring semester in D.C. as part of the Cornell in Washington program, where I worked for an energy and environmental lobbying firm. This experience allowed me to get a peek under the hood of how the policymaking process actually works and what effective issue advocacy looks like.
Additionally, the program’s combination of coursework and work experience also allowed me to solidify my interest in telecommunications law and policy. Specifically, I took a class about Native American law and policy taught by an administrator at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and worked on a policy memo about infrastructural solutions to improve broadband resiliency in the North Slope of Alaska. I found telecommunications and broadband policy to be really interesting and at the same time, during my internship, I was assigned to cover congressional hearings relating to the FCC, such as new commissioner appointees. In this way, being both a student and an intern in D.C. concurrently allowed me the academic opportunities to explore my curiosity in telecommunications policy issues while getting a pulse on how the actual congressional activity surrounding these issues was developing in real time.
What are your plans for next year?
I will be a legal analyst at HWG LLP in Washington DC.
Every year, our faculty nominate graduating Arts & Sciences students to be featured as part of our Extraordinary Journeys series. Read more about the Class of 2026.
