It’s 8:02 a.m. on a Wednesday morning as Natasha Sim, a master’s student, walks into the Language Resource Center heading to her first class of the day—Advanced Indonesian. I follow her to a room full of round orange chairs and bright white walls with two giant screens at the front of the classroom. Sim turns on the screens, and we can see her fellow classmates and professor in a room almost 200 miles away; it is similar to ours, except for the fact that the wall in the background displays “Cornell” with the university's logo written in carnelian red. Twice a week, via videoconferencing, this is how Sim learns Indonesian.

For Barnard junior Emma Senner, it all began last fall when she stumbled across a poster in the Diana Center. Soon after, her phone buzzed with a text from her mom. “Did you know about this?” it read, with a picture of the very same poster, which her mother had come across on Facebook. Within the hour, another buzz, this time from Senner’s friend and current Barnard junior Emily O’Dell, with the same photo. “Have you seen this?”

“My qualm with Divest [Barnard] is that it does tend to be predominantly white and white-passing students, especially at the forefront.”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I need to mentally prepare myself for Dodge Fitness Center on a weekday night. Whenever I go, I fall into the same routine. First, there’s the internal debate: whether to fight for a cardio machine or to pass this time around. There’s the look at the sign-up sheet, on which just about every slot for the next hour is full. There’s the ultimate moving on.

“Computer science is a man’s sport. Why are you here?” Jada Hawkins’ high school computer science teacher asked her. “This isn’t for you.”

In this week’s edition of Blinks, our staffers reflect on recent moments of resistance, from marches to hunger strikes.