I did pretty well on one resolution so far – Take every opportunity to travel. There was Mock Trial at Yale in February. This past weekend I was in Shippensburg, PA with the Cornell HR Games (basically Jeopardy, HR style) team competing in the Northeast Regional. Both Cornell teams made it to the semi-finals and went head-to-head. To my immense surprise, my team made it to the finals and went on to beat Shippensburg University. NORTHEAST CHAMPIONS, HOLLA! It’s so nice to have the plaque back after the series of Penn State wins in the past couple of years.

So other than that, why is life good? Canada broke the record for the number of gold medals at a Winter Olympic game! Ithaca is finally showing the first hint of spring! I may have exciting plans for next spring semester! NY Fashion show just keeps fueling my love for fashion! School is chill but interesting! Love, love, love Cornell.

Cornell Mock Trial has 3 teams, 436, 437, 438, as designated by the American Mock Trial Association. My team 438 fluctuates between 7 or 8 people, with the oh-so-dapper Captain Fanelli at the helm (wink).

In the weeks before Cornell’s Big Red Invitational and Yale’s New Haven Invitational, we had practices every night, sometimes going til midnight at Goldwin Smith. On cross practices, I got grilled on miniscule details from the 9-page affidavit I had to memorize. And thank goodness too, otherwise surviving the UPenn and Carnegie Mellon cross-examinations would not have been easy.

So let’s talk about Yale. The campus is a spectacular collection of gothic structures packed into a couple street blocks. It had the same austerity as Harvard, but like Harvard, we discovered the quaint little coffee shops or lunch places that Yalies frequent. I didn’t spot too many places that could’ve been sets for That’s Why I Chose Yale, which might be a relief. My photos are on Facebook.

Competition-wise, we did pretty well for a mostly-newbie team haphazardly brought together only four weeks before the tournament. One member even won an Outstanding Witness award for, dare I say, mastery of the Alabama accent.

Best of luck to the two Cornell teams moving on to the next round!

This year, I waited after the New Year and New Decade euphoria to settle down a bit, hoping the overly-optimistic and wishful thinking would be out of my system before I sit down and make resolutions that are actually feasible. So here they are, somewhat anticlimatically presented.

Write New Year Resolutions – YES! DONE! (Kidding…)

Think before I speak – to avoid embarrassment, regret, hysteria, and perceived stupidity on my part.

Do something terrifying – gorge-jumping or dancing in front a large crowd of people maybe?

Hit the big FOUR-OH, not agewise mind you, but grade-wise.

Learn to cook beyond boiling water.

Get my driver’s license, because my friends currently view my inability to drive as practically a disability.

Blog more often! And write for a publication.

When it comes to extra-curriculars, DEPTH, not BREADTH.

Take every opportunity to travel.

Sleep before 12:30 and get up early to preview lectures – I have a feeling this will be the toughest one.

Of course, there’s the “internship/career/graduate school/fitness plan/eat healthier” staple that come with every resolution list which I will bypass here.

QOTW: What are your New Year Resolutions? And how many have you broken already?

In 2000, I attended my last semester of elementary school in China (scarring Grade 3), got glasses, flew across the world, immigrated to Canada, started a new school not knowing any English, and got bullied in school for said lack of English skills.
In 2001, I made a five-minute speech in front of 500 people (take that, ESL), changed elementary schools, went on a camping retreat without parents for the first time, realized school was a piece of cake, watched Sailor Moon every single day at lunch, and used the self-check out aisle at a supermarket for the first time.
In 2002, I created a MSN account which I still use today, used Netzero dialup to get online, made my first website, changed two more schools, learned to ski (and was laughed at by the ski instructor for lack of ability), went to my first middle school dance and danced awkwardly with a boy with sufficient space between us, and hosted too many sleepover slumber parties to count.
In 2003, I prided myself on having the same bologna sandwich every day at lunch for three years running, got addicted to a gameboy for the first time, DISCOVERED HARRY POTTER, played in the park after school, went to church regularly, and visited Quebec.
In 2004, I moved across the country to the West Coast, lamented my school placements, took public transit for the first time by myself, went back to China, was addicted to Runescape, and shared a one bedroom flat with my parents.
In 2005, I started PreIB (changed schools, again), memorized half of Homer’s Odyssey, found out that hot overhead projectors had negative impacts on teachers, and may have moved to Richmond.
In 2006, PreIB merged into IB and life was taking its toll. I remember nothing from this period other than starting a job at McDonald’s at another at a Call Center, simultaneously.
In 2007, I discovered the wonders of fashion, toiled away for my extended essay, had a few more jobs, studied for SATs, applied for universities, became disillusioned with IB, and started a relationship.
In 2008, I passed IB, went back to China but came back before the Olympics, worked two jobs during the summer, cried too much, almost went to Berkeley, got contacts, had a crazy time at Frosh, blogged joyfully, and over-involved myself in extra-curriculars.
In 2009, I juggled jobs, academics, and extra-curriculars; my bank account hit $10 000 for the first time, but a few days later it was cut in half due to tuition, started a relationship, transferred to Cornell, embarked on whirlwind trips to NYC, Boston, Kingston, Toronto, and Syracuse, lived in dorms for the first time, did laundry for the first time (ha!), and came back to Vancouver and had the best winter holiday EVER … for the most part.

Hello new decade. I wonder what surprises you bring.

There is a point to this, I promise. My professor, Dr. Cletus “D-Minus” Daniel, is the epitome of an old-school, grey-haired, tweed-jacket wearing, all-knowing academic. His dress sense – full suit and tie every lecture – is impeccable. There is in fact an entire Facebook group called “We Love Clete” dedicated to him, in which one student wrote,

“Clete is, by far, the best dressed professer [sic] in all of Cornell, if not the world. I was talking to him about a credit internship and all the while I was thinking, “Damn dude! Your tie compliments your suit compliments your jacket so well! How do you do it?”

He is also a known hard grader – hence the “D-minus Daniel” nickname – and assigns thousands of pages of readings (a portion of which I’ve done to date). Another student so poignantly wrote

“Don’t let the Winnie-the-Pooh-like voice lull you into a false sense of security; do the reading or your ****ed.”

One thing I find incredibly amusing about this labor history class is the random, unexpected connections to ILR/Cornell. Once, Prof. Daniel started talking about Myron Taylor, an influential labor figure, and sensing all the raise eyebrows in the class, added on as a footnote, “yes the same guy our Myron Taylor Hall down the street is named after. He donated a lot of money”. Or in another class, an overview of a feisty union organizer ended with, “and after her organizational work with the Teamster Local, she came to the ILR school and taught for x years”. The class usually goes, “whoa”, and then revel at just how close history hits home.

Just now, I was taking notes for my term paper from an assigned book*. Out of the blue, the author QUOTES MY PROFESSOR IN THE BOOK. *facepalm* the world of labor is a small and inter-connected one. At least now I know I’m using the right book. If only I had more time to do the paper that was assigned at the beginning of the term.

* American Workers, American Unions by Robert Zieger & Gilbert Gall. READ IT if you’re in this class, it’s going to help you on your final.

Life has been hectic to say the least. Here’s a brief recap.

Work/Stay/Play in Syracuse. This is three-day “conference” that brought together 36 students from Cornell, URochester, and Syracuse U to solve, in a creative and collaborative manner, a huge issue the region faces: how to retain students in Upstate New York after graduation. Cornell paid for the transportation, food, and hotel for all her representatives so I was immensely grateful. Here’s the Daily Sun article!

Kingston getaway with my suite & Royal Military College Christmas Ball. My entire suite drove up to Kingston this past weekend to visit friends. Coincidentally, the Christmas Ball, supposedly one of the top parties in Canada, took place on the same weekend so my good friend Wendy came in from Toronto for the “festivities”, in the tame sense of the word. If I were to tag this tidbit, it would read: wall-scaling, Queen’s, poutine, pancakes, military boys men, endless dancing, black squirrels, Felix Felicis, and generosity and genuineness of so many people we met.

Student Assembly Finance Commission (SAFC) interview. Imagine my surprise when I walk into a boardroom in the basement of Day Hall to find 15-20 people inside – all ready to interview me, together, for an extra-curricular activity. With my love of interviews and public speaking, suffice to say, I decided to bath in the (doubtful) limelight of the occasion and ramble on about my previous experience doing financial services for the Commerce Undergraduate Society (THANK YOU TRAVIS). I’m happy to report that I’m a newly minted Commissioner on SAFC! Very excited to start allocating that $1.2 million (alright, less mathematically challenging than the CUS’s excel budgets but it’ll be fun).

Pants Off! for Charity event at the University of British Columbia. The organizers of this – one of whom is my good friend Lucas – will probably kill me for posting this so late, but here it is! The event was a tremendous success and raised over $400 in the span of a few hours. Here’s photographic evidence of the event

Lucas is the one on the left (you didn’t think I was going to let you off the hook by being “one of the three pantless boys” now did you?).

CORNELL, let’s see some creativity.

P.S. – My mom, an avid reader of this blog and self-proclaimed my biggest fan, will be so proud that it only took four entries before photos of half-dressed boys appeared on Ivy Years.

Do I sound like a troubled and emo young adult? Fear not, I was simply at EARS. Cornell EARS standards for Empathy, Assistance, & Referral Services, a free advice/listening couseling-like service for students who want to talk about any issues they or someone they know has. Now normally I would never admit I went to someone who loosely reassembles a psychiatrist, because let’s face it, I’m about as sane and practical as they come. I make pro’s and con’s lists for everything. Every time I take an extended trip my travel plans are carefully outlined by the hour and color-coded by categories on an excel document. I compartmentalize so well that I have different versions of my resume that fit each major career paths that I may pursue.

The reason I was on that squishy sofa next to those giant teddy bears was because a friend of a friend was undergoing training to become a counselor and needed someone to practice on. No one else she knew had issues they wanted to share so I (bravely) volunteered. It started off superficial and shallow, “sometimes I feel a bit stressed”. Duh, it’s Cornell. “Everyone wants different things from me”. Er, it’d be creepy if they all wanted the same thing (’brainsssssssssss’). Yes, the cynical voice in my head is quite loud. We dug deeper. Time passed. I felt surprisingly relieved. At the end of the day, there was no  single pinpointed stress. The joint conclusion by the counselor and myself was that I in fact had too many issues. HA! Take that Freud.

All jokes aside, EARS was definitely an interesting and beneficial experience. Next time I might even go and just chat now that I’m familiar with the atmosphere there and know that the counselors are absolutely wonderful. For anyone who just wants someone to listen, EARS is located in 213 Willard Straight Hall.

On another note, Phoebe will be taking a break from sanity for the next 48 hours as she rejoices the completion of all her prelims!

[Edit: Nov 26] Oh gosh, I just read this in the advice column of the Daily Sun and it scared me how it reflected my sentiments and state of mind almost word. for. word.

By the time we got to our hotel it was already nightfall. We drove to Cambridge and was shown around Harvard Square and Harvard Yard by our unofficial host. Sorry Ithaca, but Cambridge is what a legit college town should look like – festive shops, classy restaurants, preppy boys dressed in swoon-worthy black topcoats and Burberry scarves traveling in groups, actual civilization etc. Ithaca just has hippies. Everything’s definitely a lot closer on what we saw of the Harvard campus, which has its advantages. I do love Cornell’s gorgeous hilly landscape though.

(85Broads girls walking in Harvard at night)

The actual conference on Saturday morning took place at the Westin Copley Place in downtown Boston. 800 women from over 100 schools, with all Ivies represented. To my male colleagues, no, it was not an ultra-feminist, men bashing convention like you imagined. Professionalism, balance, curiosity, success marked the underlying themes.  The delegate bag was filled with goodies from Dior, American Eagle, Citigroup, P&G, Raymond James, Bain & Co., and the works. The opening keynote was in a surprising format – casual interview style Q&A with Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group. This was interesting because the closing keynote was from one of ABC’s biggest competitors – Alison Gollust, Executive VP Corporate Communications from NBC Universal.

(Alison Gollust, NBC, wearing this season’s on-trend gorgeous knee-high boots I might add)

My morning was a series of hilarious chance encounters. I saw people from Vancouver who flew in just for the conference. At one workshop, I unknowingly sat down at the same table as Jenny Hu, whose fame resonates in Sauder far and wide It took a few seconds for us to put the pieces together, having never met despite going to the same school for a year and hearing each other’s names every so often. I also finally met Yingna Liu face-to-face, who was a Harvard volunteer. I’ve “known” Yingna for two years through blogging, awesome eh?

The breakout sessions I attended were

• Finance 101: Investment Banking, Investment Management, and Sales & Trading – panelists from Barclays, Credit Suisse, Raymond James, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs
• Conquering the Case Study Interview – panelists from Oliver Wyman, Bain & Co., Parthenon, Monitor, Boston Consulting Group
• Beyond Banking: Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Hedge Funds - panelists from Colcomgroup, Blackstone, Harvard Business School
• Career Fair

Finance 101 was highly informative (one of the panelists was a Cornellian) and touched upon family life in relations to women in finance. The Case Study one was my favorite, and not only because Jenny Hu busted out her elite Strategic Consulting Mentorship Program skills. At this session, we broke into small groups and tackled an actual BCG case, led by associate Hana Adaniya.  Hana gave us tons of practical tips that I will definitely apply to my project with the Cornell Consulting Group.

A few very rough takeaways for consulting case study interviews

1. Paraphrase the question, extract the key point, do not repeat the whole thing word for word
2. Don’t rush through your explanations
3. STRUCTURE AND SEGMENTATION ARE GOOD, always have some kind of framework and walk the interviewer through it
4. Always provide alternatives when laying out solutions
5. But do make a final decision
6. BCG for one will usually have numbers and calculations. If you don’t have numbers you might be barking up the wrong tree (or wrong branch of the structured tree diagram)
7. Always close your response with insight -> what’s the bottom line impact? What are some next steps?

Most inspiring keynote goes to Johanna Hanneke Faber, VP for Pantene, Proctor & Gamble. She had an amazing career story and an absolutely wonderful personality that projected, simply, a love of life and different cultures. I will probably apply to P&G because of her (actually getting an internship there will be a different story entirely). Side note: I really appreciate the IBC people giving us the contact list for ALL the business delegates at the end of the day.

(Ladies from Cornell 85Broads at the convention. Wow, we’re photogenic.)

Even though I was exhausted by the end of the day – 800 women strutting around in heels for an entire day, the thought in itself is terrifying – I did manage, in typical female practicality, to squeeze in a little shopping time after the career fair. While the Louis Vuitton’s and Armani’s of Copley Place Mall was out of my price range, I did snag some Harvard/Boston souvenirs for friends and family.

The only issue I had was with the sneak-peak movie trailer shown by Alison Gollust in her closing keynote. The movie is called It’s Complicated and starrs Merryl Streep as an ambitious career woman, mother of three, and divorcee who falls for her now-remarried ex-husband (Alec Baldwin) and becomes “the other woman” in a complicated love triangle. After an entire day of valuable career advice, female empowerment, promotion of the entrepreneurial spirit, and heated discussions of work-life balance, showing a trailer which insinuates that a successful woman who has it all still can’t be happy without a man might not have been the most ideal take-away message. It was entertaining though (ha).

Finally, quotes to end an overall amazing convention.

FIND MENTORS. FIND MENTORS. FIND MENTORS. – This was emphasized by at least 5 speakers

In your first six months in investment banking, do NOT expect work-life balance. – Finance panelists

It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you. – Alison Gollust I think, NBC

I was running a bit late so my supervisor took the initiative and ordered “The Cornellian” for me – a large selection with scrambled eggs, sausage, toast, fruits, and other things which I gulped down over conversation. The best impression I have of the place is the outstanding service – all the servers addressed me by name. My juice and coffee was constantly refilled (that of course never happens in dining halls, not even during house dinners, which is a shame. Something to look into implementing?).

Lobby of the Statler Hotel, which is literally a few meters away from Ives Hall, the ILR building. (Images from Google)

Looking at the 161 Things Every Cornellian Should Do just now, I realized I accomplished half of #67 – Eat at Taverna Banfi (formely Banfi’s) and charge it to CornellCard. Next time I guess I’ll splurge on my own budget.

Y’all should try a real breakfast sometimes =D

—

I had been looking out the small window of the dingy commuter plane for about 45 minutes. Below me, neat plots of farmland stretched as far as the eye could see, cut off occasionally by winding streams. Surely we must be getting closer, I thought. As if the land below had read my mind, the faint outlines of the Cornell campus appeared. I could immediately see West Campus, and ventured an educated guess as to which one Flora Rose House is. I ticked off the other landmarks in my head: Arts Quad, Ives Hall, Schoellkopf Field… For a new Cornellian who has never set foot in New York state, this was quite a feat. The explanation? I had been staring at a Google Map of version of these for maybe months!

At that moment when my plane circled over Ithaca, I knew I was going to love this place and cast whatever disappointments in my past life behind me. I attended pre-orientation, moved in, shopped for textbooks, partied (in university-sponsored, non-alcoholic venues mind you), and proclaimed to anyone who would listen just how much I loved this place.

A week later, after I casually Skyped with my parents one night, I went to bed and sobbed for a good ten minutes. I suddenly missed home, missed my mum’s cooking, missed my friends, missed my old school, missed Canada. For the longest time I believed whatever differences that existed between Americans and Canadians were minuscule and could be easily overlooked. But physically being here in the great U. S. of A frustrated me for a while. Fahrenheit made no sense. I insisted putting a “u” in “colour” and “labour”. I didn’t know where Long Island was* and it seemed that everyone in ILR was from there.

The point of the story is that international students, even Canadians like me who can pass as Americans, get homesick, let alone those from another continent or another language background. Expect it but do not dwell on it. I learned that it doesn’t matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, as long as we can come to grips with who we are and maintain our beliefs, values, and happiness, we will not disappoint ourselves. Find like-minded people but at the same time be open to new things. Seek out support networks and talk to counselors. Play to your strength. As cliche as it sounds, embrace diversity. We’re in this together.

—

I had forgotten about the emotional rollercoaster that was those first few weeks here. One reason this little piece is important to me because it captured that moment in time, as blog entries usually do. Hopefully this is more motivation for me to start blogging again.

* Yes, I figured out where Long Island is. I now also have half the counties in New York state memorized because I deal with locations so much at work.