MOUNT VERNON — New students at Cornell College will join faculty and staff Saturday morning volunteering in several eastern Iowa communities before starting classes Monday, Sept. 4.

New Student Orientation Service Day on Sept. 2 marks its 12th year at Cornell, where approximately three-fourths of Cornell’s students participate in service projects annually. Last year nearly 350 workers donated over 1,200 hours on Service Day.

Volunteers will work Saturday from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at approximately 25 sites around eastern Iowa, nearly half of them in and around Mount Vernon and Lisbon.

Here is a partial list of the sites where volunteers will work:

Cedar Rapids
- OSADA Apartments, 905 Third St. SE: cleaning and painting apartments for MidAmerica Housing Partnership.
- CSPS/Legion Arts, 1103 Third St. SE: cleaning and repair work.
- Waypoint/Madge Phillips Center, 318 Fifth St. SE: cleaning house/garage, organizing donations.

Mount Vernon
- Davis Park and the Mount Vernon Athletic Complex: picking up litter.
- Mount Vernon Fire Department and Lisbon-Mount Vernon Ambulance Service: cleaning vehicles and bays.
- Edith Current Memorial Gardens: helping the Mount Vernon Garden Club with weeding, mulching, planting.

Lisbon
- Lisbon Cemetery: laying mulch.
- Lisbon City Park: landscaping, mulching.
- Southeast Linn Community Center: general cleanup, kitchen organizing.

Surrounding area
- Crowded Closet, 1213 S. Gilbert Court, Iowa City: organizing and sorting donations.
- Habitat for Humanity, 811 Hughes St., Iowa City: siding and roofing a house.
- Camp Courageous, Monticello: general cleanup.

MOUNT VERNON – For the second consecutive year, Cornell College is featured in “The Best 361 Colleges” from the Princeton Review.

About 15 percent of the four-year colleges in America are featured in the 2007 edition of the book, which went on sale Tuesday. The Princeton Review surveyed 115,000 students on specific topics and their overall campus experiences, ranking the schools in 62 categories. Cornell ranks among the top 15 in three categories – as a college where students are pleased with their financial assistance, where class discussions are encouraged and where professors make themselves accessible.

“The professors make this school what it is. Most don’t hold scheduled office hours because they’re there all the time, and they’re always there for the students, whether it be to talk about last night’s game or the upcoming test,” according to a student quoted in Cornell’s two-page profile.

Recognized as one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges, Cornell College is distinctive in U.S. higher education in offering the combination of liberal arts and science study within the One-Course-At-A-Time framework. Cornell also is featured again in the third edition of “Colleges That Change Lives,” a book by former New York Times education reporter Loren Pope. And Cornell was recently cited by the Times as one of 20 hidden gems in higher education that “stress undergraduate teaching, have established or rising scholarship” and are good alternatives to popular brand-name universities. The Times recognized four “northern plains” colleges: Carleton, Cornell, Grinnell and Macalester.