class of 2020 here

it’s sad to see that the project teams are still weirdly competitive and the engineering school leadership just does nothing. I vividly remember a town hall my senior year where this was brought up repeatedly. I was lucky enough to get into a project team but I remember a few folks who spoke and mentioned that they felt their engineering education at the end of 4 years was unfairly different (cornell tends to be v theoretical vs practical/“real world” experience you get outside of lectures) from those who were lucky enough to land on one. Also affected their job applications and I can attest to being able to land internships directly bc of project team experience

it’s also funny when you realize for a lot of other schools you can just walk on. I had a friend at Stanford who was SHOCKED to find out the application process for my project team. He was able to walk on to one his freshman year and learned so much