Author Archives: bx45

Rose Cafe – where you learn in multiple meaningful ways

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Last Wednesday, I attended the last Rose Cafe where Professor Blalock introduced his replacement Professor Avery for the House Dean position. We talked about how the scholar program evolved and the future of the housing system. It was a really nice conversation.

This year, I attended a couple of Rose Cafes and it was my favorite event in the Rose house. While at first, I came because of the scholar program, as times goes on, I love going simply because the I am attractive to the topics and the atmosphere of Rose Cafes. I’ve learned a lot from guests with various kinds of jobs, various kinds of background. At the same time I got to know something I was unfamiliar to, I also learned life experience from those successful guests and amazing students, such as maintaining the West Campus, how to cheer an athlete from the tennis Coach and the perspectives  from the pilots. I learned the passion about life and work, which helped me a lot dealing with my sophomore year loss about the future and what I’m going to do.

 

Thank you Professor Blalock for broadening my horizons in multiple meaningful ways and creating a cozy, relaxing and open environment where we could gram some coffee and cookies in the middle of the week. And thank you other scholars for this wonderful semester. Lastly, really looking forward to Professor Avery and wish you all have a nice break. See ya!

“He’s The Beast I’ve Ever Known”

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Last Wednesday, Coach Tanasolu shared with us the medal winner athlete Bernardo’s story of being a Cornell student and a tennis athlete at the same time. While I’m not an athlete, I can imagine the pressure of being student and a professional tennis player at the same time. Besides, he’s a very skillful athlete.

Among all the miracles he’s made, two of them most impressed me. First, he always chooses against his parents in front of big decisions. It takes much courage for him to do that. I think it’s hard to have the belief of I’m doing the right thing and others will find out my decision is the best at the end. He also had a part time job to earn his own tuition for the master program in Stanford. Moreover, when he was in an internship in Ecuador, working with the local government on earthquake recovery, he sent a video to the tennis team where he was wearing a mask which makes him hard to breathe on the treadmill. He trained himself at night as hard as he worked in the day. His perseverance and devotion greatly moved me since I am a easy distracted person which cannot focus.

During the exam period, it is really a healing experience to listen to the real story of a student athlete around us. I think I’m greatly inspired by him and be more persistent and positive to all the future challenges I’ll face!

 

Invisible Threat

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I think everyone would fall in love with the natural beauty of Ithaca when first came to Cornell but not many people would take a step further to help protect the nature. We normally assume that the nature runs on its own and recovers on its own. While the nature looks all good but there’s some invisible threat to the farmlands, forests, grassland and gorges that we might ignore.

We’ve experienced a couple of times that all dining instead of using tablewares are using the plastics plates and utensils due to the low water quality. Also I heard some of my friends saying that the tap water was sometimes brown last summer due to some pollution. I would say the threat is always there and we cannot rely on the nature itself to recover. We must also do something proactively and positively to help build a better nature.

As Andy mentioned, there’re actually a lot of ways to help establish the awareness of nature conservation. I would probably visit the nature places first which some are really not far from the campus and share with more people what I’ve learned in the talk and on the website. What’s really great is there’s actually somebody in the society taking pressuring the nature as a job seriously and definitely doing a great job. Hope there would be more people in this career!

New Perspective on Architectures

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I know we have Design and Environmental Analysis major but really know few about the major or the people there. Also, I’m wondering what’s the difference between DEA or Architecture major. While we’re doing the interior design, we mostly care about how it looks and how it functions. We really don’t pay a lot attention to the environmental interaction or sustainable design.

Small talk with Noah last Wednesday gave me a general picture about what he cares about when he is doing the design. Obviously, beyond the functional purpose and how the architecture looks, he cares more about the interaction of the architecture with the public environment and the idea of green, sustainable architecture is shown everywhere in his design. Also, one of the students brought up the idea of disability facilities like ramps which I think is really great. I think it’s worth considering why our community has less such facilities. It’s obvious that people with disability are relatively few; however, it sounds a right thing to build more disability facilities if possible. I know I’m talking from a social perspective, not considering the real condition of the buildings, but I think it’s also one of the problems in environmental analysis. Moreover, I think Cornell is doing pretty well in the gluten free station in dining which shows that Cornell is a large community trying to satisfy everyone’s needs, which not manly schools seem to consider,

From A Pilot’s Perspective

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Last Wednesday, we had a informational and meaningful talk with Mr. Mike Comella who is currently a First Officer for Delta’s Endeavor Air.  It’s really not a common thing to talk with a pilot who has been in the aviation industry for 32 years.

Taking a flight is a really serious thing, where passengers follow the rules strictly and quietly, people while  really curious about aviation, don’t have chance to ask questions. It’s even a rare thing to see the pilot. I haven’t. Mr. Comella is a really nice guy. While our questions are quite ‘creative’, not that professional, he answered professionally. For example, how a pilot not fall asleep, his favorite airports and one of the most memorable flights. It’s quite interesting to hear those answers from him, from a pilot’s perspective. These seemingly random questions actually demonstrate the job and industry more vividly. Quite fascinating occupation I think.

Also, he brought up some hidden issues that we passengers do not know. For instance, the small number of female pilots in the industry. It’s quite surprising that there are only a few female pilots. As Mr. Comella said when he was in the pilot class, there were only about two or three females in two classes about sixty people. In fact, I can’t see any direct reasons about this phenomenon and during the talk, we didn’t reach any conclusion either.

One of the explanations I could give is probably ‘mothers’ tend to stay home and look after the family. Even when they are not stay-home mothers, they prefer to have a stable 9-5 job close to where the family lives. Then, since it’s not that easy to get a pilot license, there might not be many single ladies in the industry. Or similar reasoning, they want to be close to their female friends or boyfriends while males can hang out with their male colleagues. its interesting that the fact that there are few female pilots might discourage female from pursuing the career from a sociological perspective.

Make West Campus A Safer Place

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I attended the third behind-the-scenes discussion of West Campus system where Mr. Chris VanDruff mainly described his job and talked about some challenges and difficulties of maintaining the buildings, dorms and infrastructure of West Campus.  It was a nice and instructional conversation and many students’ questions and concerns got answered.

It’s unbelievable that Mr. VanDruff, together with four more people, took charge of all the maintenance requests we place in West Campus including the main houses and the gothic.  I placed one maintenance request on the big light before and it was fixed immediately on the next day, which I really appreciated. It’s not surprising for students to wait since in such a big community where we have dorms, dining, common areas and outside roads, Mr. VanDruff might receive a lot of requests form everywhere, but I’m pretty impressed by the efficiency and good work he and his team did. He talked about how the priority system works which shows that he’s quite professional in dealing with student housing issues. And also it makes me more grateful since he really thinks for students.

Another big part of the conversation is about the security issues in West Campus. I agreed on Professor Garrick Blalock’s point that there’s some issue that the technology cannot fix and we should rely on ourselves, the community to fix these problems. I personally think the entry system with card readers is pretty advanced though we know there’s possibility for strangers coming in. However, we could do thing with the technology part since people are smarter, if someone wants to get in, he or she will find some way using  the weakness of the technology. Thus, we should rely on our selves to achieve a safer environment. For example be more alert when somebody is following you into the building and give a call when necessary notifying the campus security.

To conclude, I learn a lot during this conversation. It’s a rare opportunity for students to know the behind-the-scenes issues happening around. Also, it’s great that I can notice some faces on campus who hurried around to make our living area a better place. Thank you.

Housing in Cornell

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I know it’s hard to run a university but really don’t know it’s also hard to run a housing system.

Last Wednesday, House Professor Garrick Blalock gave us a very instructional talk on the housing system in West campus. To be honest, I didn’t expect there are so many behind-scenery things about the housing system but after the talk, I can say that the housing system is an irreplaceable part of a university and running the housing is hard as running the education system in Cornell.

Professor Blalock introduced the roles of House Professor in the houses and I’m really glad that we have such position in our house who ‘acted like the queen of Britain’, complaining about everything that could be improved to make students’ life better. Also, I’m glad that I understood better the role of House Professor and the positions and tiers of staff for each house. It’s hard to believe that there are so many people working for us in the house and I would definitely thank them for their devoted work if I got a chance to meet them.

Also, professor Blalock showed us some hidden corridors or paths that staff use to transport food. Cornell not only has a well-established staff team on running the housing system but also has outstanding and advanced equipment and resources which make both staff and students’ life more convenient and improve the working quality. I can feel it’s a really big decision to invest so many money on housing system.

After learning both empirical and practical knowledge, I’m personally very grateful that I chose to live on campus. While it’s a great experience of living in apartments independently, we won’t have too many chances in the future years where we could enjoy good food, mailing services, and other resources and also, more importantly, a community of sharing and discovering more new things. Cornell has been here for 150 years and it must have something to offer and to tell.

Understanding Sports More

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It’s said that people can learn a lot from sports. While I definitely agree with that, watching the film Friday Night Lights gives me more insight on this idea.

It’s true that we gain a lot from doing sports. Sports can make people happy, energetic and healthy. It’s also part of our lifestyle. Many people do sports regularly and enjoy their life more because of the happiness, fitness and relaxation. Rather than hanging out for dinner, more and more people might hang out doing sports together. Moreover, sports help people find friends sharing the same interest, motivating communication and sharing.

I might say that anyone who loves sports may reach the above conclusions but that’s not the only meaning of sports. While I do some recreational physical exercise for happiness, relaxation and  health, I can never classify myself into a sport person. I’m not professional and sports is not all of my life. Hence, for professional athletes, sports mean a lot more things. Take the film we watched as an example, which is football.

Being in a football team not only requires each individual to have good skills of playing football but also team work between team members, the strategy of playing against the opponents, mental stress from the audience, etc. There’s no doubt that everyone who joins the team should be really good at playing football. However, when in a game, players are largely affected not by their skills but by some outside factors such as points and response from the audience, either positively or negatively. Bobbie in the film is definitely a genius player but to some extent, his mental is not strong enough. He cares a lot about the result and also the public’s expectation. Hence, in the end he bears too much pressure and hurts himself. However, I’m still moved by his persistence and love for football and its understandable that he’s still in high school.

Watching Friday Night Lights before the Super Bowl is an unforgettable experience . This film seems to only focus on football but it actually applies to many situations in our life.