COVER STORY
Students take on the Big Apple -- Cornell's urban lab
Graduate student Huicheng Zhong during a walking tour of Manhattan. See larger image
"For example, significant coursework in the college is devoted to poverty alleviation, inequality and health disparities. The students get trained in these general areas [in Ithaca], but when they are in New York City they see the issues for real and develop a deeper respect for the importance of the curriculum."
Cornell-affiliated offices and programs in New York include Human Ecology and Cooperative Extension-New York City, which runs a multimillion-dollar operation in nutrition education and research (see related story, page 13). The ILR School has an office in New York (see End Note, page 29), as do the College of Architecture, Art and Planning and the College of Engineering's School of Operations Research and Information Engineering.
Add in the huge number of less formal exchanges -- from faculty speaking engagements and students doing internships to research collaborations -- and Cornell's overall NYC footprint becomes virtually impossible to calculate, says Brenda Tobias, director of the communications office Cornell opened in the city in 2005.
New York City's cosmopolitan environment is especially attractive to students like Maria Teresa Asare-Boadi '11 and Kristen Tauer '10, who wish to explore career options that simply aren't available in rural areas or smaller cities. They are two of 18 students in New York City as part of the College of Human Ecology's nearly 40-year-old Urban Semester Program, earning 15 credits through internships, community service and fieldwork supporting their academic study.
Victoria Averbukh, right, director of the Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan program, chats with students Raymond DiFelice, left, and Di Li in the financial district. See larger image
A boot-camp experience
Asare-Boadi is not a rock star, but she has been dutifully instructed on what to do when she encounters one. "You are an employee. You are expected to act professional," she says. But it might be tough if she crosses paths with Justin Timberlake or another of the pop stars who routinely drop in at MTV Networks.
The interior design major in the College of Human Ecology is working for a semester in the planning and design department at the music channel's famous studio in Times Square.
Aside from the movie premiere that she was invited to attend on the Paramount Studios floor of her building, her work so far has been unglamorous -- sorting fabrics, filing, answering telephones. But for a student of interior design, she says, being embedded in a workshop with so much creativity and freedom is a priceless experience and a huge résumé builder.
"Each floor has its own identity," she says, admitting that she sometimes punches unnecessary buttons in the elevator just to see what will greet her when the doors open. "Our floor has grass on the wall. The Nickelodeon floor has a huge SpongeBob that just stares at you."
Meanwhile, Kristen Tauer, a communication major, is continuing on a path that began in third grade when she started teaching herself HTML so that she could hand code Web pages. Around that same time, she would watch movies and TV shows, sketching the outfits the characters were wearing. She was an online fashion editor in the making.