With graduation looming I have begun to grasp onto anything Cornell-related as tightly as possible. I have already activated my Cornell Club membership, stopping in after a recent bus trip for happy hour. Several of my friends and professors have noted that this semester I have been treating Cornell as a New York City commuter school, regularly setting up the back table of the Campus-to-Campus bus as my personal office.

On each of my frequent bus trips I have met some interesting bona fide Cornell characters. On my most recent trip down I was sitting in the back surrounded by several Cornell professors coming down to New York for an education conference. (While I enjoyed their company, I did not like sitting next to the grad student who ate Roquefort crumbs with his fingers after scratching his very smelly Homer Simpson socks before wiping the oil inches from me.) The professors spent much of the trip discussing the Ithaca real estate market.

I wished to give them a piece of my mind about the time I tried my hand as an Ithacan real estate broker. It was the only time I experienced professional provincialism and bullying in Ithaca. People familiar with New York State real estate law will know that my license (granted in New York City) enables me to work all over the state. Long story short, after I found a potential buyer for a house, the seller’s broker refused to accept an offer from me and threatened to sue me for impersonating a real-estate salesperson (which I am!) Anyway, this unhappy reminder of my effort to becoming a working Ithacan quickly connected to something related to my thesis — networks. I am at that point of my thesis writing where EVERYTHING is related, including my nightmares of wolves eating little Mexican babies in border towns on starry nights and being nudged by an anti-aircraft ground-to-air hand-held rocket launcher while I fumbled to pay for my water at Walgreens.

Unlike what my thesis advisor, Prof. Arturo Sanchez, has labeled “literary, intellectual, Freudian” nightmares, the bus ride made me reflect positively on my Cornell-New York City-Ithaca networks. I began to wonder about my strong and weak ties. Being part of Cornell created instant weak ties with the professors around me, encouraging all of us to strengthen those ties on our four hour jaunt. The incident with the real estate broker on the other hand, reminded me that as hard as I try my strong ties to Cornell can sometimes translate into negative ties with Ithacans.

According to social network theory, people, groups or institutions are nodes connected by ties, which generally denotes whatever the relationship between the two nodes might be. Network theory is popping up everywhere these days. It is one of those things — like evolution — that once you learn about you realize everyone else has too and has infiltrated numerous majors across the university. I might be writing about it as a mode of analysis for migration trends but my roommate Katie is studying it to fulfill an econ requirement and everyone else is talking about its role in Facebook’s growth or how bacterial meningitis, HIV, Syphilis and possibly the Spring Break break-ins spread on this campus (my love of conspiracies makes me think it was an inside job friendly to both parties).

My networks have several very concentrated nodes which are geographically diverse and so intense that it becomes difficult to add new, weaker ones. I spend so much time on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that it is difficult to get to Northside Ithaca. My social scene is so heavily Greek that I cannot name all twenty graduating seniors in my major and know one person living on West Campus.

In many ways Cornell is the large public school cafeteria I never had. As a university we are extremely socially segregated. It begins with the way Cornell Housing assigns our rooms freshman year and continues with how we self-select to join houses, co-ops and societies. I came to Cornell expecting to be thrown into a melting pot of people so foreign and unrecognizable to me that I would have seemed like a novelty too. Instead, I could probably trade IDs with the majority of my girlfriends and the bouncer at Dino’s wouldn’t even notice. Without a doubt, a large part of the blame falls on me. I’m not very socially adventurous. My friends are all friends with each other. This is something I am simultaneously frustrated by and proud of. On one hand, nothing makes me happier than mixing worlds, but at other times I feel stunted by the village of Cornell. Having an intense tight network produces nice warm feelings when walking into a party or Olin Cafe and knowing everyone there but it also means many redundant ties, with limited access to new ideas or activities.

Before Cornell, I had zero ties to Upstate or Central New York even though I am a born and bred New Yorker. Even though I grew up going to summer camp about an hour away I never developed place-based ties — only social ones. I would have never have realized that the nearby towns where I bought Flurries and batteries don’t close up shop when I shipped out. I would have never been to Ithaca, never had the chance to enjoy the local farmers market, Purity Ice Cream, The Commons, The State Theatre (my favorite music venue anywhere), Collegetown or the Plantations. I might have enjoyed similar iterations of other parts of Ithaca but for me those places will always remain uniquely Ithacan. My Cornell network, thanks to my friends, professors and alumni fund cold-callers will remain strong. Whether it loses its geographical boundedness and moves to New York or draws me back to Ithaca each Homecoming and Apple Festival remains to be seen.

Simone Greenbaum is a senior in the College of Art, Architecture and Planning. Sh­­e can be contacted at sgreenbaum@cornellsun.com. Socialist Socialite appears alternate Wednesdays.