Cornell Farm Ops Sets Up NYS Veterans for Success

Walter Palmer had been farming for nine months when he noticed his best lamb, a Cheviot-Dorset cross his wife named Italy, was acting strangely.

Italy had developed a crooked neck and had begun falling. “Her back end would just give out, and I couldn’t figure out why,” he said. “That was pretty heartbreaking for me, because we thought we were going to lose her.”

Desperately worried, he called Jonathan Barter, Palmer’s farming mentor provided by Cornell’s Farm Ops program. Part of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the program sets up New York state’s veterans for success in agriculture.

Read the full Chronicle story

Graduate Student-Veteran Voices: Will LaRose and Wayne Johnson

What was your path to get to Cornell?

Will LaRose: Cornell had been on my radar for a long time. I knew I wanted to continue to serve after the Army, and that I wanted to do so at a premier university and program. Cornell’s Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA) offered that tremendous opportunity. I remember seeing their website late one night while on deployment and knew immediately that I had to go there. I was dead set on CIPA.
Read interview with Student-Veteran William LaRose

Wayne Johnson: I got an assignment to the Army Research Lab to develop a training regimen to teach what we’d learned to the rest of the counter-bomb troops. I had taught a few hundred people before, but I saw that research was a powerful microphone to project voice and knowledge far beyond my reach as a tactics instructor. So I began to see research as a means of communicating important ideas. A few years later I realized that some of the ideas and topics I found most interesting were in organizational behavior and that I could learn about and communicate those ideas through completing a Ph.D. in management.
Read interview with Student-Veteran Wayne Johnson

Kudos!

Graduate students find success at Hilton Hospitality Hackathon

Of 27 teams, a group of six graduate students took the grand prize in the Hilton Hospitality Hackathon. The team applied machine learning in customer profile clustering and enhanced the customization of the recommendation function in the hotel app. The team was awarded $1,000 and each member gets a three-night stay at any Hilton property in the world. Congratulations to Anushae Feerasta (M.M.H. ’19), Benben Wang (M.M.H.’ 19),  Nicole Cusenza (M.M.H. ’19), Zoe Edmonds (M.M.H. ’19), Tram Nguyen (M.P.A. ’19), and Rachel Zhang, (M.S. ’19)!

Other graduate students participating in the hackathon included challenge one first place winner Eilis Monahan, Ph.D. ’19; challenge two first place winners Jun Rong Jeffrey Neo, Ph.D. ’20, Li Xuan Amanda Tang, M.S. ’20, Waishan Qiu, Ph.D. ’21, and Wangda Zhu, Ph.D. ’22; and challenge three first place winner Joice Pranata, M.S. ’20.

To learn more about the hackathon and see more of the winners, visit the Hospitality Hackathon webpage.