COVER STORY
Students take on the Big Apple -- Cornell's urban lab
Kristen Tauer 10, is spending the fall semester in the Cornell Urban Semester Program as an intern with Lucky magazine at Cond Nast in Times Square. See larger image
Now, she is an intern at Lucky magazine. Three days a week, she walks into the Condé Nast building at 4 Times Square, where some of the world's leading tastemakers have their offices at such publications as GQ, Vogue, Allure and Vanity Fair.
Although her internship started during the fall New York Fashion Week, her internship duties kept her from attending the Bryant Park extravaganza. One project she's working on is an online feature (and possible future iPhone application) that would categorize and rank the best boutiques in America.
"I want to go into fashion journalism, and I can see if I like that path," Tauer says. "I don't really have the skills to be a designer, but I just love high fashion. To me, it is an art, and it tells you a lot about the social climate we're in."
In addition to three days a week at internships, Tauer and Asare-Boadi spend time working with children at schools in North Brooklyn and meeting with community leaders. Sam Beck, the Urban Semester Program's director, says his students -- half of them pre-meds doing clinical rotations at Weill Cornell Medical College -- undergo a "heightened maturation process" while they are in the city. One reason, he says, is that they spend a lot of time together, reflecting on what they are learning and experiencing.
"Clearly, being in New York has its own benefits," Beck adds. "It's an intense environment. You're running into incredible differences. Every language group that you could possibly imagine is in New York City, and you're running into them constantly. The subways are packed. You are constantly negotiating personal space. And then, of course, you're dealing with not only the physical environment, but you're also dealing with the newness of the professional environment.
"It's like a boot-camp experience, except it's self-inflicted."
Architecture student Tim Liddell 10 in Madison Square Park with the Flatiron Building in the background. Liddell is one of Cornells Life on the Hill student bloggers and is chronicling his experiences online. See larger image
It's all about location
Sometimes, if you want to compete at the highest level of your field, being in New York City is an academic necessity. Such is the case for Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan, part of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering.
Its offices are in the Financial District in Lower Manhattan, the central nervous system of American capitalism. Three stories above Broad Street's seemingly endless parade of suits, starched collars and BlackBerry addicts, Victoria Averbukh is explaining to her students how to calculate the forward price of a coupon bond. "People in the back row," she calls, immediately causing them to perk up behind their empty coffee cups. "How should you know what the repo rate is?"
They are here to become "quants" -- Wall Street speak for quantitative analysts, or numbers people. This is their last semester in Cornell's master's program, spent within walking distance of the companies where almost all of them will land after graduation. Averbukh, herself a former investment banker, directs the program.