This past Rose Cafe was especially interesting to me because Andy Zepp, an ILR grad, really opened my eyes to the vast professional opportunities coming out of ILR. I am currently a sophomore in the ILR school and I too am not sure what I want to do when I leave Cornell just yet. Often, ILR is pigeon-holed into either law or human resources. This Rose Cafe gave me another perspective and opened my eyes to the fact that those fields are not all that people do leaving ILR.

Mr. Zepp’s environmental impact was not incredible. He has impacted the Finger Lakes area in a way that we can immediately see in our community. He works to identify locations that would be valuable to the communities that encompass it. In identifying these areas he is able to preserve the natural state of beautiful places for recreation as well as economic reasons.

Another thing that we learned was the way in which human treatment of nature and more specifically soil impacts the toxicity of our bodies of water. When chemicals used in agriculture run off into the water it can create the conditions that allow toxic algae to grow in the water. When this happens it is not safe to drink or swim in the water. This happens often and in the past year every single finger lake has had an outbreak of this.