Office Hours Have Been Cancelled ... Forever!

It’s a big scary world out there, beyond Ithaca, New York. In little more than a year, me and the rest of the class of 2010 will be booted off East Hill by a smiling Skorton, with little more than a diploma and the instructions to go “do something good.”

For those of us with less than stellar grammar, “do something good” could be translated as “pick a profession within which we will excel, make lots of money and then buy an island in the Caribbean.” But for those of us who were awake in freshman seminar, we understand that “good” cannot refer to how we do something, but rather what kind of thing we do. So that island in the Caribbean may no longer apply, unless you plan on putting a homeless shelter or orphanage on it.

Over here in the College of Engineering, Mother Theresa professions seem hard to come by. Sure, there are plenty of opportunities to build water treatment facilities in third-world countries and solve the problems of climate change. But an increasing number of engineers go for the “Island in the Caribbean” route and often end up at:

A. An Exxon-Mobile or Shell research facility — a cog in the same machine that brought you Gulf War 2.0,

B. Lockheed-Martin, filling orders from the U.S. Department of Defense as America anticipates (or starts) World War III or

C. A hedge fund, cooking the books and using Brownian motion and heat diffusion concepts to create erroneous models for stock fluctuations.

Of course, I’m being a bit unfair here. Plenty of engineers will choose all sorts of careers that, while not entirely altruistic, most often focus on bettering the world. From iPods, to mass transit, to telecommunications … have you hugged an engineer today?

But there are those of us who simply have no interest in being such lovely, productive members of society. Some of us just do it as an excuse to continue learning lots of math and physics. Love, war, Shakespeare and baking are all far too complicated for us to understand. But differential equations … they just work. This is basically my rationale for why I forwent Anne Coulter’s ’84 Ivy League College of Arts and Sciences for a school where the most common second language is Java.

And so after convincing myself that the Engineering Careers Office was lying when they said, “You’re nothing without a co-op,” I decided to ditch the career track and instead look towards graduate school. I decided I wanted to be like my cool circuits T.A., Steve. While we, the undergrads, ran around like chickens with our heads cut off all day in laboratory, Steve would just calmly walk over to the oscilloscope, gently adjust the trace knob and voilà — instant success! I wanted that level of confidence. Grad school, I told myself, was the way to go.

And then the recession.

See, while we’ve been chilling up here on East Hill, an economic storm has been brewing across the state and downstream on Wall Street. Stocks are down, mortgages have been lost and liberal-pansy Keynesians like Paul Krugman have been vindicated for knowing all along that capitalism sucks.

As the dust began to settle, Cornell looked through the mist to see a shriveled endowment, a spent donor base and huge funding cuts from Governor Hoover, er, Paterson. Across the country similar misfortunes have plagued universities, and meetings to allocate lab space in shiny new buildings have been replaced by meetings to decide what — and who — is getting cut next.

Skorton has set the priorities at Cornell. Protecting the quality of education, the faculty, the institutional character and what’s left of the endowment are all high on the list. But notice something missing? That’s right — grad students. Poor Steve.

For us undergrads looking towards academia this can spell disaster. TA-ships are being cut, which means less funding for fewer grad students. So that they can afford the legions of aspiring academics they currently have, some departments are drastically cutting their graduate program admissions. If a large department, feeling a crunch, used to accept 100 students, this year they may only accept 40. If a small department only ever took six or eight students, this year they may look for no new applicants.

This is bad news for everyone at the University, regardless of position or aspirations. For current undergrads, the shrinking grad population can mean fewer lab sections or the elimination of small, upper-level courses. For current graduate students, this could mean getting rushed to finish your work before funding runs out. For tenure track professors, this lack of manpower and intellect could mean losing the capability to produce enough publication-worthy results to gain tenure.

But should Cornell be making a stand against this sort of contraction? After all, if the recession causes universities as a whole to shrink, what’s the point of producing too many PhDs for too few jobs? And, let’s face it, some departments, with federal and corporate funding, could survive as a private company with zero addition capital if it really came down to it (this is why “uniform cuts across all colleges” isn’t quite as uniform as Day Hall would like to pretend).

Well, the real problem is simple. I want to go to grad school, and I’ve got a quantum exam this afternoon that I’m underprepared for. You think I can compete with those Hahvard betches with a C-minus in quantum AND half the spots? Think again. In fact, I shouldn’t even be writing this right now … I should be studying.

Like property values and Bernard Madoff’s reputation, my dreams of graduate study seem to be rapidly evaporating. Well, maybe Lockheed-Martin is hiring …