As a major in English and history, I am often asked if I plan to be a teacher. Though I am entertaining thoughts of eventually becoming a professor, I am currently hunting for a job, ideally at a publishing company. This hunt recently led me to the annual on-campus career fair at Barton Hall. (See photo at left from the Cornell Daily Sun's coverage.)

I remember attending freshmen orientation at Barton when I first arrived to the Hill three years ago. I recall being overwhelmed but excited as I tried to absorb all of the information that would help me in my next four years.

When I returned to Barton for Cornell’s Career Fair Days 2008, it reminded me of orientation. However, instead of anticipating my collegiate career, I was anticipating the “real world.” I was bombarded with the displays of more than two hundred companies—and their free flyers, pens, highlighters, coffee mugs, and even a re-usable grocery bag.

Much to my disappointment, there were no publishing companies. Instead, I walked by multitudes of consulting companies, banking and investing firms, and retail businesses. There were a few exceptions to the corporate rule, such as Cornell Cooperative Extension, the U.S. Army, and Teach for America. Still, I felt lost in a sea of recruiters who had as little interest in me as I had in them. I left feeling flustered and fearing that I would never find a job--and recalling how my father said that I should have majored in economics or business.

But I didn’t come to Cornell to doze in giant lecture halls and learn how to analyze shifts in the stock market. I came to participate in seven-person seminars, receive one-on-one attention from my professors, and learn how to analyze shifts in a writer’s tone and language.

Perhaps no on will actively recruit me or simply hand me a job. But given the recent bankruptcy of the illustrious Lehman Brothers and talks of the financial industry’s $700 billion bailout from Congress, maybe being an English and history major wasn’t such a bad choice after all.

Since I arrived in Ithaca three years ago, the building at 120 Dryden Road (in the heart of Collegetown) has been a Bermuda Triangle for restaurants. They close almost as soon as they open, leaving the storefront empty again. Yet each fall brings a new establishment that is either unaware of or indifferent to this history.

This annoys me for two reasons: First, I can’t resist checking out a new restaurant, but mediocre food disappoints me. Second, a lackluster restaurant wastes valuable Collegetown real estate. Last year Bistro Fry, a perpetually empty, diluted version of Jack’s Collegetown Grill (more about Jack’s later), occupied the space. I once ordered a burger and fries and instead got meatloaf on a Kaiser roll with fried hollow tubes. Before the Bistro Fry, a Chinese restaurant with “Hong Kong” somewhere in its title tried out the space. The fact that both Mike, a manager of Jack’s, and I, a chronic restaurant-goer, can’t recall its name is evidence of the location’s transient occupants.

But Jack’s Collegetown Grill might break this dreary trend. It opened in August and specializes in just what Collegetown has desperately needed: burgers and other barbeque fare served without a long wait.

I wandered into Jack’s recently one evening after fasting all day—a ritual I abide by before visiting a restaurant. Despite wanting to erase my hunger, I also wanted to donate my eight dollars to my personal reverse-the-trend relief fund. Once I read the menu I knew they didn’t need my charity to stay in business. The items radiate off the menu like divine gifts: from burgers to breakfast burritos, ribs to omelettes, steaks to pancakes, subs to wings, they offer wholesome comfort food at reasonable prices. Not big on meat? Jack’s also has fish, non-meat appetizers, and veggie burgers.

I opted for the cheeseburger and fries. In my experience, this is a reliable marker of a restaurant’s overall quality. I ordered mine for take-out (they also deliver, or you can eat in). By the time I walked back to my house nearby I had already eaten most of my meal—an impressive (if not slightly embarrassing) feat considering the generous portions. As I requested, they cooked the meat medium rare and served it on a bun that didn’t overwhelm the thick patty. The high-quality ground beef tasted flavorful but not fatty. The fries deserved some attention of their own, with a crispy golden finish on the outside and substantial mash on the inside. I could actually taste the potatoes.

Although I’ve only sampled one other item from the menu, the Bo Burger (a delicious burger with a fried egg on top), Jack’s staff recommends the popular pulled pork. I have heard only favorable reviews from my friends, who have tried the breakfast items and dinner platters . Judging from the ever-present line there, it looks like Jack’s Collegetown Grill is sending the Bermuda Triangle back to the mid-Atlantic.

                                                                                                                  -- Chris Nelson ’09

As a distance runner for the cross country and track teams, I realize I represent only two of Cornell’s many sports teams . But I’m fairly certain I can speak for all student athletes when I say that after practice—sweating in September and freezing outside in November—I’m hungry.

I’m craving a five-course meal; not in the gourmet meaning of the phrase, but in the I-need-a-lot-of-food sense. Hot soup, baked potatoes, chicken cordon bleu, and a glass of Pinot Grigio set against sheets of rain sliding down the window panes of Willard Straight would be quite lovely. I mention the trusty Straight merely because it is the closest locale to Uris and Olin libraries, where I routinely pass the nights procrastinating to avoid my reading and my eighteen-minute walk home to State Street.

However, there’s no five-course meal waiting for me after my nine-mile run. The reality is, every dining hall on central campus is already closed. The National Collegiate Athletic Association allows varsity coaches to schedule twenty hours of practice a week for their teams. All athletes must also have at least one day of rest a week. Given these requirements for practice and rest, the University has kindly persuaded professors to refrain from holding classes after 4:30 p.m. So Cornell professors, thank you for your understanding and cooperation. Dining halls —we need to talk.

Twenty hours of practice over the course of six days calculates to approximately a little more than three hours a day, in English major math. Consequently, athletes leave practice no earlier than 7:30 every evening.

While I realize the University is unable to serve me wine, unless I enroll in Hotel Administration 443 – Introduction to Wines, and while I understand ham wrapped with chicken is unrealistic, I’m willing to settle for food of any kind. But Oakenshield’s closes at 7:30 p.m., and if you're not in line by 7:15 p.m. forget a dinner other than cereal. Trillium has extended its hours until 7 p.m., West Campus doors are shut by 8 p.m., and even the new Synapsis is done serving students at 5 p.m. The Ivy Room is open late, but that dungeon in the winter is pretty dismal, no offense. The only solution left for on-campus dining is on North Campus, and in a town that supports “green” means of transportation what upperclassman is going to relive the clueless freshman days and hike to the pasta line?

The Cornell athletes that get out of practice late, live far from campus, and reside with too many people to study at home, are hungry. Please, dining halls, I and the many other students leading double lives as athletes are pleading you to stay open a little later.
-- Aeriel Emig ’09

I’m out for a walk near McGraw Tower on a warm Saturday evening at the end of August and orientation. Campus is quiet—except for the human migration, a mass of youth, walking from North Campus. Their arms are locked, each person like an extension of the next. As one group appears after another, the noise increases from a low hum to an excited frenzy of introductions. Hands shake, voices laugh. The swarm gets larger, spilling onto Ho Plaza. The temperature seems to rise.

Their destination can only be Collegetown, where I live, for a real college party. They stay in large groups to ward off the unknowns that wait at those parties. It’s a bit early in the evening for such a spectacle, but I’m sure they’ll find what they’re looking for.

Later that night, I walk through the Arts Quad. It’s 1 a.m., early to head home on a Saturday night. The swarm is slowly making its way back to North Campus. Kids are walking in smaller groups now, but their arms are still locked. This time it’s less for reassurance, and more for balance. I walk toward a cluster; their shirts are dark and wet, they smell like beer, and they are happy. The night was a success: they found a party, and friends, too, to make it through the next four years.

The Class of 2012 has arrived on campus.

One of my favorite parts of Cornell is its library system. It’s a real change from when I studied abroad last fall at the National University of Ireland in Galway. While I loved my time there, I had trouble finding a place to study. With more than 15,000 students, the campus was home to only one small library! I was shocked to discover this, especially coming from Cornell where there are more than twenty.

Last week I attended my first English seminar, “Reading the Novel,” where will we study James Joyce’s Ulysses. My professor introduced us to Joyce’s work by taking an underground field trip to the James Joyce Collection, in Kroch Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

It’s one of the largest Joyce collections in the world. In addition to drafts, typescripts, and first editions of Ulysses, the collection also contains Joyce’s personal letters, including one (left) to Henrik Ibsen, dated March 1901.

While looking at one of the original manuscripts of Ulysses, I noticed how Joyce’s handwriting curiously slants to the upper right corner of each page. I imagined that Joyce wrote these pages as he was sitting at a park or a pub in Dublin—maybe even a place I had visited on one of my many trips to the capital city last fall.

To see the origins and progression of Ulysses, from notes, to a typescript with handwritten revisions, to a first edition, to a second edition, gave me a better understanding of the immense amount of time and painstaking detail that Joyce committed to his work.

The next time I get discouraged while writing a paper, I’ll think about that trip to Kroch to remind myself that first attempts are never perfect.
-- Jamie Leonard ’09

Cornell Law students must leave their laptops at home—at least for one course. Law professor Robert Summers (left) has banned the use of computers in his contracts class. He posted the notice on his Blackboard site, saying that the use of laptops during lectures discourages students from thinking on their feet.

Summers isn’t keen on iPhones either, according to the New York Times.

“I would ban that too if I knew the students were using it in class,” Summers said of the iPhone, once a description of the device had been provided to him. “What we want to encourage in these students is active intellectual experience, in which they develop all the wide range of complex reasoning abilities.”

If CAMblogger remembers her collegiate experience accurately, students who want to escape “an active intellectual experience” in class have only to stare at the head of the person in front of them. You don’t need a laptop for that.

This weekend Provost Biddy Martin is moving to Madison, Wisconsin, a typical college town if there ever was one. But the University of Wisconsin’s new chancellor won’t exactly have to scrounge for housing, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.

She’ll live in Olin House (left), a 1912 red-brick stunner that’s just had a ten-month, $2.4 million make-over. (See more photos here .) The nine-bathroom mansion had rotting timbers, burst pipes, and crumbling masonry. For decades, cream wall-to-wall carpet covered the quarter-sawn oak flooring in the sunken living room.

And then there were the bats.

“It’s the only place I’ve ever lived in my life where we had to sleep with a fishnet by the bed to catch bats at night,” said outgoing chancellor John Wiley.

The renovation added an industrial kitchen, geothermal heating, and a speaker system. There’s even a new coat room to accommodate guests’ wraps.

Olin House is named for John Myers Olin (no relation to the John Olin who funded buildings at Cornell and other universities), who bequeathed it to UW in 1924. One hopes Martin will like the house — under the terms of Olin’s will, the chancellor must live there.

Martin starts her new job September 1.

Cornell means many things to many people. At GrassRoots, it means compost. At this year's Trumansburg music and dance festival (July 17-20), Cornell Composting collected 10,000 pounds of food scraps.

University photographer Jason Koski followed the process, from half-eaten burritos to loamy soil, and came up with a video that tells the story.

Cornell Composting has information on everything from how to compost roadkill to solutions for that niggling problem of “excessive pile size.”

“When are you coming home?!” Text message received at 4 a.m. Don’t my friends back in California know that not everybody lives on West Coast time? I can’t blame them for wondering what I’m doing so far away. I just completed my sophomore year at Cornell, and I haven’t been home since Christmas.

I choose this school because I couldn’t stand the thought of following my peers to a California school. I wanted a new experience. The same rebel in me firmly decided I wasn’t going to budge this summer. I wanted to stay. In Ithaca. I think it’s independence that I wanted. To not live under the roof of my parents’ house, however comforting that may seem. To not to share a life and an apartment with my identical twin sister, who also goes to Cornell. Couldn’t I stand to be without her for just three months? I thought I could. At least, I would try to.

My sister flew home and I started my internship on the same day: May 14. It was a monumental day, which ended in breathless phone calls about home and the weather, my new job and assignments. While she commutes to her internship with Universal Records in Santa Monica, I walk up and down State Street in Ithaca for mine. Polar opposites. The thought made me smile. Besides, I told myself, imagine how much money I’m saving on gas! I was certain I was the favorite daughter now. I pictured myself as a young woman on a soul-searching expedition.

And our Collegetown apartment—it was finally all mine! With five bedrooms and three couches, I found myself wondering where to sleep each night. I occasionally wandered into my sister’s room, hoping to complete the day’s outfit with a piece from her closest. Then I remembered she took almost everything with her.

Before I knew it, June had disappeared as quickly as it came, like the upstate New York thunderstorms I am just beginning to get used to. And soon followed the Fourth of July! I was excited to celebrate with new friends. It wasn’t the traditional Fourth with a party at my family’s house, filled with relatives, friends, and neighbors, many whose names I should have remembered but never quite could. This year, I spent the day with several girlfriends, barbecuing and watching the fireworks at Ithaca College. Some sparks and ashes drifted nearby, threatening a few dry trees. I wondered if there was such thing as too much independence. A few days later my sister called to tell me about the fires in Southern California and the nearby ashes that turned the sky a somber grey. Our house was in the clear, but close enough to feel the impact.

I received plenty of advice from friends who are staying, have stayed, will summer in Ithaca. “Don’t stay here all summer, Jenny. You’ll go nanners.” Nanners? Oh, bananas, right. Well, I’ll be careful of that. I’m going home in August. The fires will have died out by the time I arrive—I hope.

Jenny Niesluchowski '10 was a CAM intern this summer.

Ithaca Carshare has been rolling for less than a month — but already nearly half of its 120 members work or study at Cornell.

“I knew Cornell would have a big role in this, but I didn’t expect that percentage,” says assistant director Andy Goodell. The University is subsidizing reduced rates for students, faculty, and staff.

The local nonprofit offers members the use of six Nissan hatchbacks whenever they need one. Members make reservations online, then pick up a car and pay hourly and per-mile fees. The hatchbacks are available in Collegetown, near Kennedy Hall, and at the Dairy Bar, as well as other locations in and around Ithaca.

To learn more, visit ithacacarshare.org or the Cornell Chronicle.