Fall Thus Far

So it's been quite a while since I've updated this. Fall has proven to be an extremely busy and tumultuous semester. I'll do my best to enumerate the more important trends here.

I started serving on the Cornell Council on Mental Health and Welfare, convened by Vice President Susan Murphy, and it's been very education so far. I haven't been able to plan en extremely active role in setting the conversation since it's Vice President Murphy, the Director of Mental Health Initiatives, the Deans of the seven colleges, and other various administrators, but I have been able to provide what I hope has been valuable insight from a student's perspective.

Also, on the service train of thought, I'm planning to participate in Alternative Spring Breaks this year. In case you're not familiar with it, Alternative Spring Breaks provide students with the opportunity do charity work during the week we have off during the spring semester. I'm hoping that I'll be able to do something in New York City, either in the Bronx or Manhattan.

I'm also looking to apply for various fellowships an programs. A few weeks ago, I went to an info session on the prestigious UK fellowships like the Rhodes and the Churchill, and then I met with the Cornell Fellowship Coordinator last week, and she thought I would be a viable candidate for any of them. There's not a whole lot I can do for that right now; she said, looking over my resume, "Well, it looks like you're already doing what I would normally advise students to do." So I'll just have to follow up with her next semester and see where to take it from there.

Speaking of studying in the UK, it looks like I'll be spending my second semester of junior year at Oxford studying Computer Science at St. Edmund Hall. I haven't actually done my application yet, but the Cornell Abroad folks seem to think it shouldn't be a problem.

And finally, a bunch of other IS students and I had lunch today with some of the folks from the Undergraduate Admissions Office about how they could better utilize web technologies to engage prospective students. To give a little background, the Director of Admissions, Jason Locke, and I have been talking on and off for the last year or so about how we could work together for the good of Cornell and the Information Science program. The last time we chatted (over lunch at Bamfi), he thought it would be a good idea to get some more IS people together with some of his staff to talk about how they use the web. So that finally came together today, and I think it went really well. I don't want to post to many of the details since it's all very preliminary still, but there were a lot of good ideas. Also, Jason and I are working together to get a single day during the Cornell Days (when prospective student visit in the spring) devoted to Information Science. So he said he'd speak to his staff person in charge of that and get back to me. If we actually pull it off, I think it would be a great way to get more students interested in the major.

Oh, and also as a side note, Nick and I finished the ISSA Resume Book a few days ago, and now we're just waiting to mail it. Thanks to SAFC funding, it looks absolutely beautiful. Hopefully it'll make an excellent impression on employers.