On the Hill

Alright, so this is waaay late, and most likely not many people will still be checking the blogs, but here it goes.

After finals are finished, us graduating seniors have a period of time known as Senior Week,commencement on Memorial Day Weekend. This is sort of the pinnacle of our social lives at Cornell and one last time to cut loose before we depart Ithaca. No responsibilities, in fact none even on the horizon (as opposed to orientation week http://web.cornell.edu/studentblogs/ben/?p=26 or rush week http://web.cornell.edu/studentblogs/ben/?p=111 , two other responsibility-free weeks which, however, have the looming academic semesters the following weeks.)

Let me preface this week by saying I have been sort of “training” for Senior Week since freshman year. I have been fortunate enough to as a result of summer jobs starting late and military committments which made it easier to stay in Ithaca, attend every senior week during my four years. At the fraternity, senior week is quite a big deal and I have had some great times over the years. I have also observed activities and events the prior seniors organized in order to evaluate what worked and what didn’t. So, I took it on myself to organize senior week for the 15 graduating seniors in Psi U.

I took this quite seriously. A good month out I organized a schedule and had a bunch of email correspondence with the guys. We had an excel spreadsheet which broke down the plans for each day. I set up a wine tour on an “old fashioned trolley” around Seneca Lake and rented tents for a campout. We purchased a swimming pool for the back porch and organized many other events. The week was amazing - certainly one of the best weeks of my life.

At Cook Street we hosted a barbeque which had over 200 confirmed guests! We played a lot of games, ate a lot of food, and luckily didn’t get any noise complaints or anything like that. Overall - success.

Senior week, as a whole was a quite interesting phenomenon. We tried to stay away from the bars actually as much as possible. The reason being that people who spent four years cooped up studying and whatnot suddenly get the urge to be social before they graduate and infiltrate the bars. I guess that is a little overboard, but the bars are just extremely overcrowded is what I am trying to say.

I’ll talk about commencement soon…

Well, I know I haven’t been around much, but the blog has been active in its own sort of way. Check out some of the things I have been getting lately:

First, me blogging about Vaseline in my hometown Boston.com http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/16/college_blogs_tell_it_like_it_is/

Next, this is a great email I received from someone in response to my “KayToo Fund” post. Way to legitimize the hotel school!

“This sounds like an awesome course! I finally decided to transfer to Cornell after reading some of the blogs…I especially like yours + Jenna’s. Hers are sometimes hilarious and she likes to poke fun at the hotel school. One gets the impression that their courses are somewhat easier, but after reading about all the work you’ve had to do there, it sounds like this is one of those awesome courses Cornell has to offer. Thanks for sharing it with us!” - Bert

And a comment that makes a lot more sense if you are familiar with the misery that was (and is) Officer Candidates School,

“I happened upon your blog while searching for Marine OCS. I was at
OCS the same summer you were, and probably walked past you across the
damn bridge, and saw your company getting the hell out of Brown Field
when it was still our 5th week. Congratulations on finishing bulldog,
I know what an accomplishment it was.” -Yuwynn

Alright, so the reason I have been MIA for so long is I have been working on our final project for my HADM 429 - Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management class. There is no final exam and the majority of our semester grade is based on our performance on the project.

This year, the assignment was: you have 1 billion dollars, design and execute over the course of the past year, a hedge fund.

So, two weeks, nearly 150 hours of work and multiple consecutive all nighters later we still did not have a functioning excel model but we were ready to present to the class (we are given one more week to complete the model and write a 15 page report.) The presentations are actually a competition, called the “Mug and Shot Award.” Now, it seems silly but the professor actually takes the award quite seriously - the winner is engraved on the plaque which hangs in his office. His excitement in the award flows through to us students and as a result everyone is gunning for the award. The class is quite competitive and truly represents the best finance minds Cornell has to offer; there are students from every undergraduate college and quite a few grad. students as well…

After toying around with a few ideas for macro based funds I started doing some reading about convertible arbitrage funds. Although it was a difficult undertaking, we decided to plow ahead designing a convertible arbitrage fund. Collecting the data and sorting it took nearly a week alone. Let alone the fact that it was an incredibly complex model to design. Basically, we were in way over our heads but put together a compelling argument for the presentation to the class. We presented in the evening section and during the section one group is voted by the class to the finals (one group from the morning section is also voted in.) Finally, one group is chosen by a panel of the teaching assistants and the professor as a “wild card” bid to the finals. Luckily, we were chosen as the wild card and to my surprise headed to the finals. We had strategically only had one group member present in the initial round (since each group member, of three, can only present once.) I knew the most about the concepts we based the fund around so I presented in the finals along with our third group member. The other two groups had used the tactic of having their two strongest members present initially.

The finals was truly something to be seen. I came out with so much energy that people actually asked me if I was drunk. I wasn’t, in fact I was just delirious on so little sleep. I made quite a few jokes, some even a bit crude, and through it all I literally screamed with excitement. Let’s just say that the tactic worked. I got everyone’s attention and when it came time to vote it was clear we would come out as the winners. It was still surreal when the professor called our names as the Mug and Shot winners and I can’t explain how happy I was that night. It was incredibly rewarding having the one pinnacle project of my Cornell career end with such success. I was on cloud nine as the entire class moved down to the Regent Lounge in the Statler Hotel for a bar tab thrown by the professor.

This truly was an amazing class, an even better professor and it is fitting that I capped off my Cornell academic experience in this way.

I guess I never actually posted about our Joint Sevices Ball. Each spring semester the ROTC students in the three services (Navy, Army, Air Force) get together for a large dinner and ball. Sadly, this was my last joint services ball but it was a good one. The speaker was the father of one of my Navy ROTC classmates and he gave an incredibly moving speech. I was literally on the brink of tears and many people in the audience couldn’t hold back.

Would like to write more but I am still trying to complete probably the biggest project of my life. In my investments class, our final grade is based on a group project. We have been working for nearly two weeks on it and are probably over a hundred hours deep. The scary thing is, part of it is due tomorrow and we are far from being done…

Me along with my buddy Drew and our dates.

This past weekend Psi U hosted our annual Parents’ Weekend. This is always a fun weekend since we all get to see our parents but more importantly, we get to see other brothers’ parents which is always good for a few laughs. My Mom came this year and got in late Friday night. Since she is an alum, she wanted to grab a drink in collegetown so we stopped in at Stella’s which is sort of a trendy restaurant/bar.

The next morning we went down to Cayuga and hopped on a cruise around the lake. The cruise actually was about two hours long and I think we went all the way to the other side of the lake. We got to admire all the nice houses on the shore as well; it is quite a desirable area. Angela’s Mom made the trip up to Cornell as well so they joined us on the cruise. After the cruise we met up with my aunt and uncle who were in town for my cousin’s fraternity parents weekend and went out to Maxie’s (my favorite restaurant.) It was good seeing them - my uncle is actually a cartoonist http://www.glasbergen.com/ so he provided quite a few laughs.

After dinner we headed back to the house for the Parents’ Formal. This was definitely the best part of the day because we had brought in a band that usually plays at our semi-annual crush party. His name is Jamie Notarthomas, check him out Jamie Notarthomas. He certainly got the crowd going and although my Mom went home a bit early, Ange’s Mom stayed pretty late in the night dancing up a storm with us. He did a great job of playing songs the parents would want to hear and keeping everyone pumped up with songs like “Shout.”

I might be MIA for the better part of this week. I have a massive, massive project due Thursday. I pulled an all-nighter last night for it and we are nowhere near even being in the vicinity of complete. Wish me luck (I think I say that way too much for a second semester senior who should be relaxing…)

Sweet, sweet lax

Anyone who is familiar with college lacrosse knows that the perennial powerhouses have always been: Syracuse and Princeton. But… not lately. There has been a new entrant into the “elite” college lacrosse programs - Cornell. For the past few years we have gotten better and better; consistently making post season play and staying near the top of the rankings. This year has been no different, we have been ranked #1 nearly the entire year and are the only undefeated team left in the nation. While Princeton has struggled in the past few years, they are quite good again this year and our only real competition in the Ivy League. So, as you can imagine it was a big deal when they came into town yesterday afternoon.

Thankfully, the student body rallied around what has become the best collegiate team at Cornell (since in the past they did not always get the attention they deserved.) A huge tailgate was organized and it really rivaled the turnout for the big football games, including homecoming. The weather was also beautiful which was a great change from the snow we had just a few days ago. Temperatures broke 70 degrees and it is amazing the effect the weather has on students at Cornell. When it is snowing in April, students mope around, walk slowly to class with their heads down and tend to stay inside during their free time. 70+ degrees gets everyone out of their house, the clothes start to come off (guys at Cornell can never believe girls actually own skirts!) and people neglect their work in order to have fun. The tailgate was a huge success and the lacrosse team won definitively 10-6. All in all, it was an amazing Saturday afternoon at Cornell.

Senior Matt McMonagle stopped 19 shots in the win.

In Memoriam

I am usually against what can sometimes become false sympathy or “hopping on the emotional bandwagon” in terms of some people’s reactions to large scale tragedies. As a follow up to that, I am not going to try and explain how I feel or what can possibly be going on with the families and individuals affected by this terrible tragedy. I am glad that the few students I know at Virginia Tech are still alive, but I know it is just random luck and it could easily have been one of them, just as easily as this could have happened anywhere and it could have been any of us. My thoughts and prayers go out to those families and my mourning goes out to those who lost their lives.

I hope we can never forget what happened, and I certainly do not think it is appropriate to move on in any way. However, it disgusts me to watch this monster on TV again and again and I find myself needing to turn the TV off. I hope soon the media can move towards celebrating the wonderful lives of those who were lost and not giving a murderer exactly what he wanted - a spotlight.

Initiation

The “Run”

Every year a few seniors from the house hop in a big truck or SUV and drive all the way to Ohio and back in a day (6 or so hours each way.) The purpose - picking up a large quantity of a very hard to find and Psi U tradition beverage, enjoyed by the older guys in the house…

I decided to make the trip this year along with two close friends, John and Dave. We departed at 4 am on Saturday morning and trekked all the way to just outside Cleveland, Ohio. Dave, who headed up the “mission,” had looked up a distributor in the area and assured us they would be open all day Saturday. As we neared our location, we asked Dave to call and double check that they were in fact, open. 8 calls later, we realized they either weren’t answering their phone or more likely were not open. Plan #2, google.com on Dave’s spiffy new BlackBerry. Believe it or not, there was another distributor very close to us, just over the border in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Our next course of action was to rent a small U-Haul trailer to transport back our future purchase. So, again to google. We found a U-Haul place right near by our new distributor destination. We stop in, hook up the trailer and realize John’s tail lights are a bit busted and won’t hook up to the trailer. What to do… The guy who ran what was merely a storage center (NOT a U-Haul center) told us to “drive to any mechanic… they will fix it in a second.” This guy was total weird toast (that’s for you Pinky.) First of all, any mechanic could not fix it and it was also Easter weekend. We went to the dealership, closed. We went to a Sears auto center, no help. We went to a used dealership; they pointed us in the direction of the U-Haul mega-center. At the U-Haul mega-center, they were much more lenient with the requirement that the tail lights be functioning 100% correctly and sent us on our way with a nice little trailer.

Next stop, the distributor. Upon arriving we learned that they were the only place in all of PA which sold our particular beverage. They chuckled at our request since it is by no means hard to get due to its premium nature, in fact, probably the other way around… They loaded up our trailer, only pausing to shoot me a smile while saying, “You boys just about reached max towing capacity with this order…” They generously gave us some t-shirts and we were on our way home.

We pulled back into Ithaca at around 11 pm after getting an astounding 6 miles per gallon on the way home. Most people had given up on us or assumed we were terribly lost, but it really did feel great to come through for the house. It was truly a road trip I will never forget.

Blatz!

Graduation?