Jacky Wang

I had lived in Taipei and Vancouver for 18 years when I decided to come to Cornell. I knew that I wanted a change from living in a large Asian-dominated city to a small town with diversity. Ithaca was the right choice. I still remember the scenes that I passed by on the Shortline bus to Cornell vividly. I saw patches of farmlands and herds and herds of cows. I was slightly shocked, and I wondered if I was going for a retreat or a study. I think I made the right choice. It was a study in a retreat environment.

I joined the ASCE concrete canoe team in my freshman year. The goal of the concrete canoe team is to make a canoe out of a strong light-weight concrete mix that would assure an effortless paddle to the finish line. When I first started, it was slightly intimidating to be given the task of finding the shape for the canoe by using AutoCAD, a program that I had never seen before, but soon I realized that this was the way of learning at Cornell. You just need to try it before you know you can do it. One of the coolest things at Cornell is that every individual is so motivated. People sometimes came to the lab with their shirts and ties from an orchestra concert or with the strangest T’s from a party; once you put on your red coveralls, you work days and nights to really deliver a product that you believe in.

I have now taught AutoCAD for two years, after taking the class in my second semester. Being a TA on campus is more of a fun activity than a job. Teaching students on campus here is really exciting, because everyone has worked extremely hard and they ask challenging questions, the kinds of questions that that would make you want to sit down and churn on for half an hour and then realize that you need to do a bit of web-searching before you can give them a satisfactory answer. Being a TA here assures you that you will relearn your material through students’ ways of thinking all over again. It’s fun, it’s challenging, and it’s extremely rewarding.

Being a Cornell student, you always have endless opportunities to try something new through student-run clubs. I joined the Aikido club in my freshman year because I wanted to get stronger through practicing martial art. In the end I didn’t improve my chance of winning in an arm wrestle match, but I am still deeply in love with the practices where I constantly get thrown around by my sensei as if I were flying temporarily while doing so. I also learned how diverse Cornell can be, when I went to an Aikido seminar in Toronto with my club. At the Canadian border, we handed four passports to the customs officer, each one a different color. Seriously, where else can you see that happening?

Cornell engineering has a set path for students, but the students here never follow a single path. In my sophomore year, I knew that I was deeply interested in earthquake engineering, and so I took the senior level structural dynamics. In my senior year, I heard the Master of Engineering students are designing a 150-story skyscraper; I immediately talked to the project advisor and got an approval to participate in the design as well. At Cornell, if you know where your passion lies, you can always find support from the faculty. Cornell, with its near 150 year history may sound like a monolithic and rigid organization, but it is in fact a vibrant, diverse, and supportive community.