Why choose Cornell?
Get to know us
We're looking for a new member of the leadership team at Cornell ... and we want to get to know all about you and what you'll bring to the college, of course. We thought you might want to get to know us a little better too. Let us introduce ourselves:
We're not in Ithaca
Indeed, we're the original Cornell, founded in 1853 and we're proud of that fact and several other differentiators. Our campus is also one of a very few where the whole area is on the National Register of Historic Places. We feel like we have a dynamic mix of historic buildings and modern facilities built for cutting edge teaching. (Ask to visit Russell Science Center when you come to interview.)
People like us...
We have rhythm
And we don't mean just in our music program or our football players who are also dancers. The whole campus has a daily rhythm as well as our One Course At A Time calendar. We have a common schedule that everyone, students, faculty, and staff, fall into here—class from 9-11 a.m., lunch, study, and office hours from 11 a.m.-1 p.m., class or study again from 1-3 p.m., then more time for office hours, extracurricular activities, and study until dinner at 5 p.m. (If at all possible, when you interview, eat at our Hilltop Cafe, there's a lot of delicious options from which to choose.)
One Course At A Time is the second rhythm. 18 days of class Mon-Fri for 3.5 weeks. Four days of break Wed-Sun. Repeat. It sounds hard to get used to at first, but it gets into your blood and you get to know exactly what you can expect for first week, second week, third week, and don't expect anything from students or faculty during fourth week.
You'll have a wide variety of innovative programs to learn about
Another thing about One Course At A Time and Ingenuity ... faculty have the freedom and ability to focus on developing innovative courses for, and with, their students. 20 Plays in 20 Days is a theatre course that can only happen on the block plan since students can head off to Broadway without missing any other class time. Holocaust and Human Rights in Europe takes students to walk the sites of the Holocaust and rights violations and consider the direct impact of history for a full block. Intimate Relationships is a psychology course where students observe and study relationships in the field at a theme park during class. With the pandemic, one faculty member restructured her next course, for Block 8, to focus on the science behind it.
With 50+ majors, and the ability to design a B.S.S. to fit their exact interest profile, students here can customize their education to meet their passions. And they have the ability to change that on the fly, block by block, if they learn something that redirects them. No waiting until next semester to course correct.
With our new Ingenuity core curriculum we're putting the focus on making the most of the liberal arts and preparing students for the worlds of graduate study, and future work. We want students to gain as much hands-on experience as possible, and implement interdisciplinary thinking to solving real world problems now and in the future. To that end, we restructured our requirements to include those opportunities for every student who matriculates here.
We love research
Students at Cornell are introduced to opportunities for faculty research and outside research as early as the summer of their first year here. The Cornell Summer Research Institute incorporates research from all disciplines and tackles a variety of intriguing projects. Did you know that soft drink by-products might be the next big thing for helping combat climate change? Or that the by-products from paper milling industry could help purify drinking water? And why play air guitar, when you could play air keyboard?
We have 19 Division III teams, and over 1/3 of our students are also athletes
Student-athlete is a common moniker here and students are engaged across a wide variety of campus activities. One Course At A Time also helps to simplify travel and practice schedules for our students, the common schedule and lack of conflicts give our faculty and our coaches common ground for helping students make the most of their experience and coordinate schedules. Go Rams!