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The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/2001/02/02/fencing-heads-to-mass/)

February 2, 2001

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Fencing Heads to Mass.

By ryan | February 2, 2001

The Big Red fencing squad (1-3 overall, 0-1 Ivy) journeys to Wellesley and MIT this weekend for two important mid-season meets.

Tomorrow, major competition will commence for the Big Red fencers as they match up with Vassar (2-3), Tufts, and Wellesley (4-1) in Boston, Mass.

All three teams have been performing well this season, with Wellesley leading the pack in terms of wins.

Sunday, the team remains in Boston for a match against Brandeis (4-2), Boston College (2-1), Brown (3-1 overall, 0-1 Ivy) and MIT (3-0). This will be a tougher day, as all four squads post strong records thus far in the season.

Recently, Kate Boyle and Jessica Peakes of Boston College were chosen to compete at the Under-20 Junior Olympic Championships, which will be held in two weeks in Salt Lake City, Utah. They are competing to prepare for the tournament, so they are expected to have good performances this weekend.

Brown placed first in the Northeast Fencing Championship Tournament last year and will be the only Ivy League opponent during the weekend. After suffering a 19-8 loss to Harvard last weekend, the Bears hope to even out their Ivy record against Cornell.

The Big Red is entering the weekend with the same drive, after losing to Yale, 18-9 before the winter break. Cornell also has some momentum from the NIFWA Chamipionships in December, during which many of the Red’s fencers performed very well. Senior Ellen Rajfer placed second in the foil competition and junior Tara Hatami finished fourth in the same style.

Cornell is looking to improve upon its overall record, while also earning its first win in the Ivy League.

Archived article by Kelli Larsen

Related

Early Admissions: Ivies Alter Policies, Outlook

By ryan February 5, 2001

The first step of the nerve-racking and highly competitive Ivy League admissions process is over, and the results are in. This year, early decision (E.D.) applications are up in all eight of the Ivy League institutions. One of the major elements of Cornell’s E.D. process changed when it decided to deny some early applicants outright. The University had previously either accepted or deferred all of its early decision applicants to the regular decision pool. Most of the Ivy Leagues reject from a quarter to a third of their early applicants. Admissions officers decided to incorporate that element into their early admissions process by denying some students who they knew “will not be competitive in the regular decision pool,” said Doris Davis, associate provost of admissions and enrollment. “Rather than defer these applicants to the regular decision pool and deny them in April, Cornell and many other schools believe that it is more fair to the student to deny the applicant early,” Davis said. Unlike many of the other Ivies, including the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Harvard and Columbia, Cornell has always been proud of the fact that it has never accepted more than one third of its incoming freshman class early decision. Many universities have been criticized for accepting such a high percentage of their freshman classes before considering the regular decision applicants, since “underrepresented students do not apply early decision in as large numbers as other students do,” according to Wendy Schaerer, Cornell’s interim director of admissions. “When you have Ivy schools that fill 50 to 60 percent of the class through an early process, then this sends the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) message that E.D. is the ‘better way’ to apply to a school,” Davis said. In the Nov. 29 issue of Columbia’s student newspaper, the Daily Spectator, a student wrote an opinion piece titled “Early Decision is Discriminatory,” in which she criticized Columbia’s policy. “As Columbia admits more students from the early decision pool, its ‘need blind’ admissions policy is undermined,” the student wrote. “There isn’t a lot of geographic, racial or socio-economic diversity within most E.D. applicant pools,” Davis said. “And so, to ensure that the entering class is diverse … we need to be mindful of the number of students who are admitted E.D.,” she continued. Most schools reported that their minority admissions had gone up modestly this year. Dartmouth reported an increase from 47 to 61 minority students receiving early spots in the incoming class out of a pool of 1,135. At the University of Pennsylvania, numbers of Latino early applicants rose from 59 to 74, while African American applicants remained steady at 69, out of 2,833 applicants. Out of all the Ivies, Dartmouth’s philosophy most closely resembles Cornell’s. Dartmouth’s student newspaper, The Dartmouth, reported that the college accepted about one third of its Class of 2005 early, rather than the 40, 50 or 60 percent of its peer institutions because it is trying to decrease the pressure on high school seniors to pick an elite university and apply to it early decision. However, “more and more students are applying early decision,” Davis said, and there is a statistical advantage to applying early. Yale University had the highest percentage increase in E.D. applications, at 17 percent, while Princeton’s and the University of Pennsylvania’s increased by 11 percent. Cornell saw a seven percent increase this year. This increase in applications meant a decrease in the percentage of early applicants accepted to their school of choice, but the actual number of accepted students stayed about the same for most schools. For instance, Yale’s acceptance percentage dropped from 36 to 29 percent, but the number of accepted students only dropped by 21, from 547 to 526. All of the Ivy League universities accept a larger percentage of the early applicant pool than of their regular applicant pools, which makes it tempting to apply early to the especially selective Ivy Leagues. “The trend of Ivy schools regarding E.D. applicants is difficult to predict,” Davis said. “It will be interesting and important to monitor this in years to come,” she concluded.Archived article by Maggie Frank
Cornell 101: Rushing Back

By ryan February 5, 2001

After spending a month galavanting around the world, partying as the clock ticked down to 2001 and feasting on home-cooked meals, the freshmen of Donlon 2 were surprisingly anxious to return to Ithaca. “Home was relaxing, but definitely slow at times,” Kate Blosveren said. “I was ready to come back. The break was long enough, and when I left, pretty much everybody else was gone or leaving shortly.” Whether they crossed the Atlantic or crashed in their old bedrooms, the freshmen couldn’t leave their classes too far behind