But you go to a great school, not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness.

Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.

-William Johnson Cory, Eton Reform, 1861

• As of 2009, at least 5 of the 20 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellows have a Cornell connection: three were Cornell undergrads (Dan Klein (CS), Bobby Kleinberg (CS), Adam Siepel), two were Cornell postdocs (Regina Barzilay (CS), Josh Bongard), and two are current CUCS faculty (Bobby Kleinberg and Rafael Pass).

• Cornell alums include: the head of the search group at Google, the Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the inventor of the Palm Pilot, the co-founder of Blackboard.

• Graduates of CUCS classes '94-'06 include faculty at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Toronto.

• Graduates of the Cornell CS class of 1993 include three Sloan fellows, two MacArthur fellows, and a coinventor of Microsoft Surface.

• Cornell's team, including CS majors, was one of the top six in the Darpa Urban Challenge. Chronicle article

• Jason Rohrer, CUCS '01 (and a TA for me in CS481), was named one of Esquire Magazine's "Best and brightest 2008" for his work on emotional and artistic video games, and his game "Gravitation" won the Jury Prize at IndieCade 2008. CUCS short blurb, Esquire article

• As of 2009: Given the results of this year's competition, Cornell University is now tied for #1, with CMU and MIT, in number of winners of the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards. One male undergraduate and one female undergraduate receive this award among all undergraduates in North America studying any area of computing research. Cornell's three winners since 1995, the inception of the award, are: Allegra Angus, 2002; Omar Khan, 2003; and Tal Rusak, 2009. In 2008, we had three honorable mentions: Kareem Amin, Tyler Steele, and Siu Yu Cherie Kwan.

• The three invited speakers for the 2009 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) all have Cornell degrees (two bachelors degrees from CUCS and a PhD from CU TAM)

• Cornell is the only university in the US with its own hydroelectric plant. (Cornell Alumni Magazine, March/April 2009)
• Once called "the first American university" by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.
  Today's Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation's first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League. (from http://www.cornell.edu/about/). More on the birth of an American university
• Cornell was 2nd in the NSF's list of institutions whose undergraduates later earned PhDs in science and engineering (1997–2006). (It is 22 if one normalizes for size.) Source: NSF08311 brief
• It is said that Cornell ranks third as the undergraduate institution where women engineering faculty were trained. (ADVANCE report)
• The first woman to earn a Doctorate of Science at an American university, Caroline Baldwin Morrison, earned it in 1895 from Cornell.

• feature on Ithaca in the New York Times
• Ithaca: one of the "10 most enlightened towns in America" (Utne reader), a place said to have more restaurants per capita than NYC, and more