Yesterday I was asked what my favorite memory at Cornell Tech was.

My first thoughts were to the fun times. [Redacted] dancing like a gorilla at nightclubs. [Redacted 2] channelling Beyoncé at in a Christmas sweater party dance-off with yours truly. The glamorous law crew rocking out in Ithaca.

My second thought was meeting some people that I had a total nerd-crush on, from space-tech, fashion-tech, art-tech, money-tech, law-tech. All the things-tech.

I knew what my strongest memory was. It was struggle.

But I knew what will really stick with me. I knew what my strongest memory was. And it was a difficult one. It was struggle. Struggling to communicate ideas in Engineerese. Struggling to understand why a feature that looked so easy was functionally impossible. It was working with Money Days all day and all night to pull off a demo. It was struggling with my End Human Trafficking, fin-tech, Sears, VR hackathon and ZCT teams, with teammates from literally every faculty. It was struggling to recover from crit that threw our ideas to the ground. It was getting shut down in pitch-offs, and recovering to build something great.

It was applying the hardest lesson that we were taught in start-up studio — that the only secret to entrepreneurship is to be able to take more punches than your competition. And the critical lesson from leadership in the studio: that the only secret to leadership is to try and draw everyone else’s strength and knowledge out of them. And the most important lesson from PM — build skateboards that tell your story.

So my best memory here was presenting with teams after little or no sleep, with fingers crossed behind our backs that our demos wouldn’t crash.

Like the protagonists that we are on the planet of adventure, we can conquer any challenge by working well together, not despite our diversity, but because of it. With a dash of business, a touch of ORIE, Health Tech, Connective Media, Law and a healthy dose of engineering, we could build anything. But more importantly, we could build something great.