What about life after Rochester? Here’s what recent grads report are the essentials of being a UR alum:

1. Head back to campus for Meliora Weekend.
2. Laugh at all your friends when they complain that it’s cold out.
3. Find a place that makes garbage plates in your new city.
4. Represent UR at a local college fair or interview prospective students.
5. Use your UR ID for student discounts because it has no expiration date on it.
6. Keep in touch with a professor.
7. Join the Rochester Alumni Exchange.
8. Support a UR sports team when they play a local university.
9. Attend regional alumni events.
10. Once in a while, have a Genny Light.
11. Request as many transcripts as you need from the Registrar while they’re still free.
12. Read the Campus Times.
13. Reconnect with classmates, even if you weren’t great friends in college.
14. Submit an entry for Photo Friday.
15. Celebrate D-day.

Congrats, Class of 2010. Enjoy the summer!

Dr. Lawrence has been the head of the Finger Lakes Poison Control Center as the only doctor on call for all of these 54 years. Concerned members of the community can call the hotline and find out if what they accidentally consumed or touched is poisonous. If there is a suspected problem, the person on the hotline directs the poisonee to head to the emergency department. However, Dr. Lawrence estimates that for every dollar spent on the poison center, $20 in health care costs are saved due to the decreased unnecessary visits to the ED.

And this isn’t even Dr. Lawrence’s day job! She has also spent years researching the benefits of breastfeeding and is the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ breast-feeding section, which is how I got to meet her; she came to my nutritional epidemiology class to talk about breastfeeding. She has been quoted in many internationally-renowned news sources describing the benefits of breastfeeding. Needless to say, Dr. Lawrence is one pretty awesome lady, but that’s a side note.

Most importantly, the new budget for New York State is proposing to cut funds to poison control centers across the state. If this goes through, the Finger Lakes center is in jeopardy of being cut altogether, leaving 12 counties in the area without an accessible poison control center. Many of these counties are rural and their residents don’t have easy access to medical care. As the old adage goes, “a stitch in time saves nine.” If Dr. Lawrence’s estimates are even remotely correct, it is well worth the money spent to keep the poison control center over. Plus, think about how many kids will be missing out on the cool neon stickers!

What have you been up to since graduation?

I have been working for Bank of America Merrill Lynch (formally Merrill Lynch) in Global Derivative Risk and Control.

Specifically, what kind of work do you do?

I am responsible for senior management metrics reporting, managerial commentary and the Fed reporting for global derivative operations. I also partner with our global reporting team to validate and automate as much of the senior management reporting as possible. I also partner with our lines of business and internal auditors to make sure any issues are closed out in timely manner.

Do the certificates you earned at Simon give you an edge professionally?

I believe they have given me the ability to view my work and any challenges I face from angles that most people can’t see. For example, the accounting and finance classes have given me a deeper understanding of how my work and the problems I face will eventually make their way to the sub ledger and balance sheet where many of my colleagues at my level don’t. Additionally, my certificate work has always been something that has been discussed in every job interview I have gone on.

Any advice for graduating economics majors?

Make sure that you pay attention to everything you are being taught, including the little things, as you never know when they will come in handy. There have been numerous times where I have had conversations with people at work and I remember something that Professor Landsburg said and it fits in perfectly to the stream of thought.

Plans are currently underway to develop the 19th Ward and the Mt. Hope corridor into a college town. What would you like to see there?

I think that four or five restaurants, a Wegmans and a couple of pubs would be perfect. That would give the students a place they could go out without the hassle of walking (probably more than halfway across campus) to get their cars.

What’s the alumni community like in NYC? How do you stay involved?

The alumni network in NYC is pretty active. They are regularly setting up events and I try to go to as many as possible. I have not been able to attend as many events as I would like, but I have been staying involved with UR in other ways, such as alumni interviewing of potential students.

What do you miss most about Rochester?

The thing I miss most of all is that I had the rare ability to spend all four years living either with or down the hall from my best friends. Some from the first day of freshman orientation, some I met in the halls of Psi U, but for either group it was the fact that I was able to get up and just walk a few feet and hang out with them. I also miss the snow, as crazy as that sounds. Winters in NYC are very different as the snow almost immediately turns brown upon hitting the ground. I also miss Uncle Dicky’s cheese fries, if you know what I am talking about you probably miss them too.

Depressed Vagabond and Former SA President Eric Weissmann announced during Open Forum the death of the extended Fall Break proposal. Apparently, the faculty didn’t feel like teaching another week of classes every few years just so students could have another day off from school. FALL OUT!

Also in Open Forum, Sen. J.J. Gonzalez introduced three constituents: Brad Orego, Arielle Friedlander and (making her THIRD SENATE APPEARANCE THIS YEAR) Danielle Levine. The three introduced themselves as “dancers on campus,” which is an adorable slang for “Ballet Performance Group” that fooled absolutely nobody. The three came because BPG is trying to organize a dance network. The problem, though, is that some of the dance groups on campus don’t want to join the proposed network — but Policy & Review standards require 100% participation for a network to be approved. The Senate upheld support for that standard, but suggested ways to get the other groups on board. IT’LL PROBABLY NETWORK OUT.

The Committee Chair reports were all along the lines of “nothing” or “finishing stuff.” INFORMATIVE!

New Business hit the mother lode with 13 items. And 13 proved to be an unlucky number yet again as the rest of the meeting would take until 2 a.m. so that the committee chair positions could be filled for next year.

APPROVED:

1. Sen. Andrea Sobolewski as Policy & Review Chair
2. Alena Czekai as SA Executive Historian (she’s really, really excited, like, really)
3. Sen. Dan Cohn as Fall Elections Chair
4. Wendy Wang as an SAAC Accountant
5. Danielle Chiz as Communications Chair
6. Dayanna Davis as a SAAC Accountant
7. Megan DeWitt as Sustainability Coordinator (her second term — RECYCLING!)
8. Emily McGraw as Experience Eastman Coordinator
9. Joe Ciminelli as Executive Aide
10. Rainie Spiva as Executive Aide
11. Rebecca “Becky Donnelly” Donnelly as Projects & Services Co-Chair
12. His Majesty Bradley Halpern as Projects & Services “Co-Chair” (Supreme Overlord)
13. Last week’s minutes and attendance records

Some qualifying:

The meeting had two rounds of executive session. The first, called by Sen. Kristian Brooks, involved Item #5 (don’t worry, feminists, we’re not referring to Ms. Chiz as an object), who did not seem to bring much initiative to the role of Communications Chair. Discussion over her qualifications or lack thereof lasted approximately an hour. This was made funnier by the fact that Weissmann, along with former Speaker of the SA Senate Kierstin Hughes and former Sen. Sylvia Guerra got thrown out along with the rest of us common folk. VENGEANCE!

In the end, Chiz passed muster, as did Ciminelli and Spiva, the targets of the second executive session called for by Halpern. This one entailed whether or not to have Executive Aides at all, when it was clear the aides would just be used to fulfill the executive agenda that not everyone likes. But the Executive Aides were approved nevertheless. There have probably been worse ideas. HOW ABOUT AN “INHABIT HUTCHISON HALL” PROGRAM?!

Just when we thought it was all over, SA President Scott Strenger announced that, wait a minute, three standing University committees needed student representatives, since apparently they’d be meeting over the summer. These include the Transportation Advisory Committee, the Bar Bus Committee and everyone’s favorite bunch of lovable nincompoops, the Standing Committee on Alcohol Policy and Education (CTQ has obtained an artist rendering of SCAPE). Sen. Alissa Brill cried bullshit that this had to happen on the last meeting of the year, and nevertheless the Senate granted Strenger the right to fill the vacancies for the summer recess. A-PPOINTED DEBATE!

So there it is — the bulk of the final Senate meeting this semester. FREE AT LAST.

With a final thud of the gavel, Acting Speaker Asad Arastu ended the last meeting of the year, as well as the grand experiment contained under the banner “Call To Question.”

This column started out as a test of three questions:

1. Is the SA government, including its committees, both effective and necessary?
2. Will this column drive students to attend SA Senate meetings?
3. Will this column help hold the SA government more accountable?

After hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of meetings, in which we had perfect attendance (better than multiple senators), we learned some things:

1. Generally.
2. Inconclusive.
3. Ish.

Last year, we were generally unimpressed with the presidency (the original elected leader had abandoned the school, and his successor never appeared thrilled with the job). We couldn’t really distinguish what student government as a whole did aside from allot money and create new groups.

This year’s government has certainly had its achievements, although reducing the amount of useless conversation and general parliamentary confusion within senate meetings has probably not been one of them. The biggest fight, though, continues to be for respect — not from us (that’d be silly), but from administrators. Dining Services has certainly been receptive, but it is clearer and clearer each week — from the beginning of the year with SCAPE, to the Taxi Program restructuring with Parking, to printing fee issues and fall break issues — that student government is routinely fighting an uphill battle.

Whether or not our own efforts mattered, well, we’ll be optimistic. This past week, the “dancers on campus” stayed through the meeting until the first executive session, well after their own business had expired, so maybe we’ve raised a little bit of interest here and there. And we’d like to think that something about our gentle, amicable prodding of the Communications Committee helped get the names of the new senators online, but that could just be coincidence. (It’s not — also, the Senate Web site needs to be updated still.) HIVE MIND!

Potential abounds for next year’s government, and we bet they won’t blow it completely (WHO WANTS TO START THE POOL? MR. WEISSMANN, WE KNOW YOU’RE GETTING IN ON THIS).

And just because we lost dozens of painful, unpaid hours that didn’t even garner a Student Life Award nomination doesn’t mean this wasn’t fun.

Occasionally.

Adjourned!

Jeers to the tuition increase, making UR even harder to afford in tough economic times.

Cheers to the expansion of opportunities at UR over the summer. Additional cheers for taking student input into account in this strategic planning.

Cheers to the Rochester Buzz and @Rochester, two great ways to keep alumni in touch with UR happenings.

Jeers to the lack of campus-wide, wireless Internet access. The River Campus is just over 100 acres—this should be fairly easy to implement.

Cheers to the women’s basketball team for making it to the final four. Additional cheers for the online broadcast of the championship games.

Jeers to the Rochester Review for not allowing alumni to opt out of receiving a print edition. This would be an easy way to promote sustainability.

Cheers to Eastman for reaching out to local youth through both the Eastman Pathways Program and the first annual Day of Brass, making an important connection with the community.

Going to a major Championship like the Europeans obviously takes a lot of time: The tournament itself lasts for six days plus two days of travels across the Atlantic. Moreover, as the Europeans take place right before the finals week, school work needs to be distributed before and after the tournament.

Thankfully, our professors have been extremely helpful and understanding. The national federations usually nominate their teams four weeks before the tournament so there’s not that much time to make necessary arrangements with the professors. However, both of us - and Andres Duany who represented Peru earlier this year in the South American Games - were very lucky to have professors who were nice enough to make some exceptions with deadlines.

Professors, this is much appreciated as representing our countries is a great honor for us and we will never forget these experiences. Thank you for making it possible for us.

However, there are some students out there who are truly interested in both the natural sciences and the humanities or social sciences. For these students, it may feel as though there’s little hope for mixing these two when they get to the “real world.” However, recently a new inter-disciplinary topic has come up in my classes — science in the courtroom. Last Friday, David Rosner, Ph.D., a scientific historian gave a talk about what it’s like to be an “expert” in the science field testifying for a court case. He shared enlightening stories of “counter experts” who had no knowledge of science testifying in the courtroom and of “professional witnesses” who have “Ph.D.” written after their names and are therefore considered experts in fields about which they may know nothing.

On Tuesday, in my field epidemiology class we talked about the role of epidemiology in the media and the courts. There are multiple new toxic tort cases going to court every week, and both the plaintiffs and the defendants need scientists to back their claims. It’s the scientists’ jobs to accurately convey the information and explain the science in a simplified way that everyone in the court can understand, as well as to explain why other people may refute their beliefs and why their claims are the accurate ones. It was an area of science about which I had never thought before, and I think it’s a great way to mix interests in what is truly an inter-disciplinary world.

It turns out that last weekend, Larry Gheen — the head of a group known as Americans for Legal Immigration PAC — was speaking at a rally in Graham’s state of South Carolina and asking that the Republican senator “come out of that log cabin closet,” making a reference to the Log Cabin Republicans, a GOP group that nonetheless supports gay rights, and saying that being gay “is a secret that Lindsey Graham has.”

To no one’s surprise, this came after Graham decided to work with Democrats and President Obama on immigration reform. In fact, it came because of Graham’s decision; according to Gheen, “I hope this secret isn’t being used as leverage over Senator Graham.” In other words, anytime a Republican breaks with the party line for their own principles, not only are they “selling out [their] own countrymen,” but they must be doing so due to some form of blackmail. Gheen’s belief that Graham would not break with the Republican platform without some overhanging phantom is somehow quaint, but more importantly, Gheen knows the dog whistles in his audience, and he knows that whether Lindsey Graham is gay, straight, bisexual, transsexual, or anything else, he has just been frozen in his audience’s minds as another of the fearful “others” — the bad people, the homosexuals, the liberals. Lest anyone forget, this is exactly the kind of discourse we were supposed to have rejected.