This year’s Apple Harvest Festival transformed downtown Ithaca into one giant stage for local artists eager to showcase their respective creative disciplines. From hypnotists to the amazing acrobats of the iCircus to street musicians with open guitar cases filled with all the Ithacan population’s loose change and single-dollar bills, performers lined the streets and brightened the atmosphere with a vivid stratum of sound and color.

Freshman: you’re a virgin. I’m a virgin to this whole column business. We have a lot in common. As a sophomore, I am infinitely older and infinitely wiser than the masses of you that have been storming campus since last Friday. You’re probably homesick, most likely lost and definitely out of your element. Not that I was ever in that position. But I can imagine what it must feel like.

Since I’m a pretty generous person, all things considered, I thought I’d christen this new column with a little spattering of advice for the otherwise clueless 4,000 students that will be aimlessly confined to their dorm rooms, cafeteria of choice and the Cornell Store, because that’s all there really is to see in Ithaca, right? Well, almost.

As the semester rolls to a close with bands booking their last shows at The Nines, a capella groups begging you to come to their spring performances and Slope Day just a week away from filling the East Hill with one final musical celebration, I’ve already started to switch the gears on my music agenda to focus on summer.

Last Friday was quite possibly one of the ugliest days of the year. Amidst the down pour, the wind and the negligible sun, I had the great fortune of showing around a family friend who had flown 2,000 miles across the country to come see Cornell in its springtime beauty. But who are we kidding … spring in Ithaca? After the warm, sunny, flip-flop weather I had just experienced the day before, I found myself in a relentless struggle to convince this prospective student that it’s not always like this. “If you were only here yesterday,” I told him, “you would fall in love with this place, I promise ... trust me ... please?” The more and more I talked in circles, the more I realized I wasn’t really trying to convince him. I was trying to convince myself. But why?

Tonight, the Ithaca Common Council will hear a debate on the Collegetown Urban Plan and Design Guidelines that consulting team Goody Clancy developed last fall. We applaud the student-lead effort to lobby Common Council and implore students to head downtown tonight to ensure that the student voice be heard.

However, up until this point, we feel this student voice has been misinformed.

Private universities are not the only educational institutions facing dire financial circumstances. In Ithaca, the public school system faces cuts ranging from $5 to $7 million, causing administrators to scramble to figure out where exactly the system needs to be cut down.

“We offer a very high level of education here in Ithaca,” Beth Kunz, a member of the Ithaca school board and events planner for the College of Architecture, Art and Planning said. “We will still be educating our children, but it’ll be different. We’re going to have to change the way we do business.”

With its sweeping hills and unique architecture, Cornell offers a great deal of beauty for its students. But is that beauty enough to turn Cornell into a tourist destination? In The New York Times Travel Section from Mar. 1, Jane Margolies praised the Ithaca campus as one of five campuses that “have become popular tourist draws for their cultural offerings.”

Ithaca, as the urban capital of the Finger Lakes, is a common stop on journeys to the various vineyards and other local attractions for New York City residents, according to The Times. Cornell, as the largest attraction in the city, draws a large number of those visitors.

An apparent breakdown in communication among city officials may have led Ithaca police officers to enforce the city’s noise ordinance against an evangelical preacher last August in a way that had previously been deemed unconstitutional by a federal appeals court.

The “misunderstanding” will now cost the city $10,000 as part of a settlement it reached on Feb. 12 with Syracuse resident James Deferio, who sued the city last November, claiming that the city violated his First Amendment right to free speech.

Many students were excited last week when the City of Ithaca Planning and Development Board approved plans for an Urban Outfitters store set to hit downtown Ithaca this summer. The store is part of a larger plan meant to bring more people to downtown Ithaca. Hopefully, however, the trip to a new chain store will not mark students’ first visits downtown. As residents of Ithaca, Cornellians have the responsibility to be active in the community around them, rather than merely shop in it.