In Brief

Students open gallery

The Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) chapter at Cornell has only been around for two years now, but it’s already leaving a mark, both on campus and in the Mount Vernon community.

The team won four awards at the Chicago Regional SIFE Competition in April 2010, its first regional competition. The team received the Rookie of the Year and First Runner-Up awards. Karen Mercer, SIFE advisor and Cornell’s vice president for business affairs, received the Sam M. Walton Free Enterprise Fellowship. And Kait Wiszt ’10, president of the SIFE chapter, received the Service Leadership Award.

The gallery, called Gallery Off First, opened in October with works by the art faculty and their colleagues. But the plan is to expand that and offer a professional gallery space for student, faculty, and community artists to present their works to the world.

King gets a new crown

King Chapel’s roof is as strong as it ever was-and likely stronger. Workers spent five months tearing off old slate shingles, repairing supporters, and installing lighter composite shingles on the 1882 chapel. The work is the first phase of a $2.5 million renovation and restoration of the National Historic Register building. The next steps include repointing the masonry and installing an elevator.

Web extra — see photos of the progress on the Cornell College Facebook page

New look for Old Sem

The first floor of Old Sem got a makeover last summer. Residence Life and the Registrar’s Office switched places, and walls came down to open up a central space for a number of student services. The new look was designed to give students easy access to make financial and registration transactions.

Tree in memory of alum’s Cornell roots

Nearly 50 people came together on campus in October to honor the memory of Todd Stichnoth ’83, who died in February.

The gathering around his memorial tree was the highlight of Homecoming for Stichnoth’s friends and classmates, as well as for his family, who came in from the Quad Cities, wrote Terry Murphy ’85. Stichnoth, who worked for 21 years at Runge Mortuary in the Quad Cities, was an AXE. About a dozen current AXEs attended the ceremony as well.

“The significance of the tree, gathering of friends, and exchanging of kind words meant the world for the Stichnoth family,” Murphy said.

Soar above the Hilltop

Everyone knows that Cornell has a beautiful campus, but what makes it so? Art Professor Tony Plaut ’78 talks about the Historic Register campus in an aerial tour video posted on the Cornell News Center.

Plaut explains that the way campus is laid out, the types of buildings, and the location of the college in Mount Vernon all contribute to a sense of balance, and that’s what makes it so appealing.

In the three-minute video, using footage shot from a helicopter in May, Plaut talks about the features that make Cornell special.

“One is the simple fact that we’re on a hill,” he said. “The campus is not built in such a way that it tries to fight against the topography of the land. We haven’t tried to build the campus to conform to a geometric grid. Instead, the campus has slowly grown up in a somewhat organic fashion, and this produces a lot of charm.”

 

Cornell’s ‘Silver Girls’

Lora Baltes, Sheri Hotz, and Denise Hanna-Bennett (from left) came to Cornell in 1985 and have never left. Each has worked for all or most of her 25 years in the Office of Alumni and College Advancement and was given honorary alumni status by the Alumni Board at Homecoming. The trio works on the same floor of the Paul K. Scott Alumni Center.

Ped Mall piper

With King Chapel undergoing renovation, new students got an al fresco introduction to the college at the annual New Student Convocation. The college held the convocation in the quad bordered by the Norton Geology Center and South and College halls. In a short ceremony—it was August in Iowa, after all—Interim President Jim Brown and the college’s new Dean, Joe Dieker, welcomed 384 new students to Cornell. At the start of the ceremony, the students marched from Allee Chapel along the Ped Mall to the quad, walking past two lines of faculty and staff and led by a bagpiper.