Who is it? Have you found someone yet? When are you going to announce who the Convocation speaker is?

These are the questions that have surrounded me for almost a year during my tenure as the 2009 Convocation chair.

In the bars.

Around Statler.

When I’m standing at the restroom sink in the Straight.

I cannot avoid this constant nagging over the identity of the 2009 Convocation speaker. And it’s getting really annoying.

Well, friends. The time has come and I will be announcing the Convocation speaker in the short term. Long gone will be the days of me trying to spread rumors that the speaker is Kermit the Frog, former disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich or Matthew Fox of Lost. (Columbia actually had Fox two years ago. Boom. Roasted.)

“The job market sucks, my man,” a real estate consultant regrettably acknowledged at an investment conference this past week. “But look at the bright side,” motioning an erect pointer finger toward the fully stocked open bar, “There’s free booze!”

Continuing, he lectured that I really ought to blame my parents for “having me when they did. You could have avoided the economic climate,” the consultant concluded, “and would have had a much easier time when job hunting.”

I thought about his cheeky observation for a while and then realized that graduating this year isn’t that bad. Sure, our economy is in the toilet, job offers are being rescinded left and right and the thought of paying back my student loans makes me grimace.

I frequently look forward to long breaks between semesters because it gives me an opportunity to escape Ithaca and get back in touch with reality. To unwind, I try really hard to stay away from Facebook, Gmail and Cornell’s homepage.

I try, but I usually fail after about a day or two.

Something draws me back to this place. Something makes me start counting the days until I brave the four-hour drive from Northern New Jersey to Upstate New York. I find myself looking ahead to another great semester filled with stories and learning experiences.

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.”

And if you’re one of the lucky few that does have a job offer, the thought of your firm rescinding your offer to save a few bucks has surely crossed your mind. After all, you probably have an “employment-at-will” contract.

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.

Slope Day is the one day of the year that our entire University community comes together. Thousands of students converge on Libe Slope on the last day of classes in the spring semester to enjoy music and each other’s company.

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?

I’m a firm believer that I can spend my money better than you or some elected politician can.

I prefer smaller government and lower taxes. I like processes to be transparent and clear, especially when it comes to dishing out my money.

Each semester, as an undergraduate, you pay $102 ($204 per year) into an account known as the Student Activity Fee (SAF).

The Activity Fee is a vital instrument in ensuring that undergraduate Cornellians are able to enjoy many staples of life here on the Hill: Slope Day ($15 per student per year), Orientation Week ($5.65), Senior Week and Convocation ($14.50), concerts ($12), and much more.

Are you familiar with the place “Where everybody knows your name … and they’re always glad you came?”

Oh C’mon! Are we all a bit too young to remember the show Cheers? (It’s OK. I was born in ’86 and at the time, I was more concerned with Mr. Rogers and Thomas the Tank Engine).

Cheers took place in a Boston bar called Cheers and aired on NBC from 1982-1993. The show followed friends that met to drink and have fun (sounds pretty familiar to our daily lives, no?).

No twists. No crude humor. Cheers taught us to enjoy the finer things in life. It was plain and simple.

I’m not here today to talk to you about TV shows that have been rerunning on TV Land since the infancy of the Bill Clinton Administration.

I was told that a lot of people would stop reading my column if the words “Student Assembly” appeared anywhere in the first sentence. In my first two weeks at Cornell of not being on the S.A. in over two years., I’m starting to see why.

The idea that is the Student Assembly, once a well-respected body, has turned into a travesty.

Sun Associate Editor David Wittenberg put it best when he wrote in his column nearly a year ago, “theoretical accomplishments aren’t the point of a student assembly. The point is to foster a healthy campus debate. The point is to argue. The point is to make noise — on a large, inclusive scale.”

I completely agree with David’s sentiment. In a way, the current leadership of the S.A. realizes this, too.

Where (exactly) do you go to school? Welcome (back) to Cornell University. For those of you who got off the bus thinking this was Cornell College in Iowa (Yes, there is such a place. Google it.), now would be a good time to get back on the bus.

“Where the hell are we?” I heard one Freshman say to another as they drunkenly walked through Collegetown in front of CTB this past Orientation Week.

“Outside of Mary Donlon, I think,” replied the second.