If you’re like me and you will be ending your time at Cornell in May, you must lie in bed at night thinking “It’s a helluva time to be graduating!” Unless you have been living under a rock for the last several months, you’ve noticed that the job market for recent college graduates is, in a word — pitiful. Jobs are scarce and companies are coming to interview at Cornell to merely save face. To make matters worse, they send a follow up, token e-mail of “We were impressed by you, but frankly, we’re just not hiring this year.”

The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly (GPSA) has been pushing for the Edgar Winter Group to come for Slope Day 2009. They’re not really … but they certainly could have fooled me with all of their singing of the band’s hit song, “Free Ride.” That’s because with the GPSA’s current funding for Slope Day and the Slope Day Programming Board, they are in essence taking a “free ride” by way of a pathetically low amount of funding.

When filling out my absentee ballot, I checked off every Republican, including a white-haired war veteran from Arizona. But I’m not going to tell you to do the same or tell you why I think they’ll run the country better than others. I have a Ronald Reagan poster in my bedroom and a McCain-Palin bumper sticker on my car. I gave Governor Mike Huckabee a standing ovation when he spoke at Bailey Hall last spring. But I’m not going to advocate that you do the same. What you do is your business. What you believe is your decision. How you express your beliefs is also at your discretion. And I’m not going to think any less or more of you because of who you support and what you believe. Who am I to judge?

The current SAFC’s funding guidelines permit for redundancy among groups, wasted funds, and inactivity. A hypothetical: I can create a club for rocks. My friends and I can apply to the SAFC and hypothetically a certain dollar amount. But what about some other guys in my fraternity who, more specifically, like limestone rocks. They create the club for limestone rocks, apply to the SAFC, and also get funding. Why not combine the groups into an umbrella organization for rock lovers? To change this, I propose that the Student Assembly dissolve the SAFC and entrust undergraduates with the final say as to where their $76 goes.

I’m here to help you reflect on the place that enables us to recalibrate, meet with our friends, and help us see that “our troubles are all the same.” That place is something I’m afraid some of us take for granted… That place is CTB. And that is exactly somewhere that Cornell needs to be using its funds to add to its real estate portfolio, as well as adding a viable revenue generator and enhancing the quality of life for faculty, staff, and students.