Great bump.
It depends on your major and how hard you challenge yourself. Generally, if you have non-quantitative, non-science major (ie English, hotel school, ILR, government, History, AEM - undergrad business major, etc.) then its pretty easy unless you go above and beyond and take hard classes to challenge yourself. Generally, if you have a science or quantitative-heavy major like engineering, pre-med, computer science, etc. then it will be pretty challenging. Those are huge generalizations but the point is your workload and the difficulty will be completely based on your major (but of course this is true to some extent at all schools).
The real difference is in the attitude of students. At Cornell, people generally go to class, do homework, or study pretty hard Mon-Thurs. A lot of people do school work during the day on Saturday. And Sunday is known as a big homework/study day to prepare for the week ahead. That being said, of course people find time to hang out late some nights in the evenings, eat 3 meals a day, go out 2-3 nights a week, get involved with extracurricular activities, watch a few hours of TV or sports a week, and waste time online. In comparison, my friends at state schools seem like they spend only a few hours a week doing school work and have an absurd amount of free time to go out or hang out almost every night and do little to no work each weekend.
If you're smart, its very easy to beat the mean (in most majors). There's a lot of people that get in for reasons aside from their intelligence.
As for getting in you need to be in the top 1-5% of your class in h/s - basically you need to have taken the hardest courses offered in your high school and gotten A's in almost all of them. You also need a laundry list of time-consuming extra curricular activities including a few areas that you were very involved in. You also need to write a powerful essay that explains why you want to go to Cornell. You need decent SAT scores >2000 if you went a high school that sends kids to Ivy League schools including Cornell and if you went to a small high school that doesn't typically send kids to Cornell you better be valedictorian (or all A's in hardest classes if your school doesn't rank) and have a very high SAT score >2200. These statistics are flexible especially if you have an outstanding achievement (ie won a national research competition, gave a TED talk, etc).
Early decision, writing a powerful essay on why you want to go to Cornell, and applying to a less popular major with a good reason why (ie applying to be an agricultural sciences major having started a local farming cooperative) will help you get in.
Feel free to message me if you have any other questions.
