Four Graduates, Honored as Student Leaders, are Traveling Different Paths

At the 2009 ORIE commencement ceremony, Director of Undergraduate Studies Professor Robert Bland presented awards for leadership at Cornell to four graduating seniors, Anne Ready, Thomas Bleymaier, Zacharias Dentes, and Nathan Ford.

After graduation, Anne Ready was scheduled to begin work at Kurt Salmon Associates in Manhattan, with weekly forays to client locations.  However her start date has been delayed until January 2010 due to the economy.   In the meantime she has traveled to Greece and France, studied for GMATs, improved her golf game, run in charity races and accrued experience in retail as preparation for work at the retail, consumer products and health care consulting company.

In addition to graduating magna cum laude, Ready is distinguished for her involvement in community service.  She worked Wednesday mornings as a volunteer at the Tompkins County SPCA and spent one day a week at a medium-security correctional facility near Ithaca, working with young male inmates to prepare them for high school equivalency exams.  Ready is one of four 2009 ORIE graduates whose fathers also graduated from ORIE, a fact that was also recognized at commencement.  

At Kurt Salmon she will be following in the footsteps of many graduates over recent decades who have joined the analytically-oriented firm.  She considers her current work, at an Urban Outfitters store in her home town of Madison, Wisconsin, as valuable preparation for the consulting role.  "It's been good to see the other side of the retail industry - while we took plenty of classes relating to inventory management or supply chain it is another thing entirely to see what that looks like on the day-to-day level in a store," she said. "To be a good consultant one needs not only to understand the math behind such systems but also to make that technology easily accessible to the store employees who operate it," she continued, noting that her experience so far has "illuminated the aspects of retail which we didn't focus on in class, such as loss prevention or determining what customer service levels can realistically be maintained given the price point of the product."    

Tommy Bleymaier was elected by his teammates to be one of the three varsity football team captains for the 2008 season.  Bleymaier came to Cornell from Boise, Idaho, where his father is Athletic Director at Boise State.  Tommy started his academic career in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, read a description of Operations Research and recognized the importance of the field towards achieving efficiency, for example in determining the optimal use of time.  Since he was on the football team as a wide receiver for all four undergraduate years, he needed to plan his time effectively, lifiting weights for an hour a day, attending classes until 3 PM (carrying a 19 credit hour load in his final semester), and spending five hours a day in football practice.  As an indication of his achievements in effective use of time, he was on the Dean's List for seven semesters and graduated cum laude.  On the field, he ignited one of the most exciting comebacks in recent Cornell history when he scored a touchdown on a fake field goal atempt against Brown in 2008.

Bleymaier is currently an MS student  in Management Science and Engineering a department at Stanford University that has close ties to ORIE.   "I have a few entrepreneurial ideas," he said, "or may work on Defense or other government applications."  He spent the summer working for not-for-profit Syracuse Research Group on a system designed to counter the threat of radio controlled improvised electronic devices, of the kind used in roadside bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He notes that "the program is closely related to OR at Cornell, and I feel very well prepared for the courses I am taking."  These courses cover a striking array of topics, from technology and national security (taught by former defense secretary William Perry), technology venture formation, investment science (taught by former Cornell lecturer Kay Giesecke), and machine learning.  Although he is planning to complete his degree in one year, "after spending one month here, I don't know if I'll be ready to leave in the spring," Bleymaier said. 

Ithaca native Zak Dentes was also a team co-captain.  He played on the sprint football team and was the starting quarterback for three years, leading the team to a 15-4 record.  He was selected for the all league first team twice and second team once. He was  in Navy ROTC and was the brigade commander of all of Cornell's ROTC cadets in all services.  He was commissioned on May 23 as a second lieutenant of the Marines, "probably the proudest and most significant moment of my life," he said. A photo of Dentes with his teammates was published in 2006 by the New York Times, with an article about the sprint football team.

 In October Dentes begins his first active duty assignment,as a Marine at the Basic School at Camp Barrett on the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia.  At the end of six months he will receive his primary military occupational specialty, perhaps as an infantry officer or a pilot.  "Perhaps I could be persuaded to look into logistics," he jokes, reflecting that logistics is a major military area in which operations research is employed.  While awaiting his deployment to Quantico, Dentes worked as an assistant sprint football coach, helping out with the defensive backfield.  

Dentes noted that every Naval ROTC student memorizes two lists during the week of Naval orientation that precedes the regular freshmen new student orientation week.  One is a list of leadership traits: justice, judgment, dependability, integrity, decisiveness, tact, initiative, enthusiasm, bearing, unselfishness, courage, knowledge, loyalty and endurance.  The other is a list of eleven leadership principles, among them "set the example," "be technically and tactically proficient," and "seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions."  

Dentes recalls walking on campus as a child with his father George Dentes, who was  ECE '76, Law '79, played both varsity and sprint football for Cornell, and served as the County District Attorney in Ithaca for 16 years. In 2006, when Zak was a sophomore, George Dentes died suddenly of a heart attack two months after publication of the Times photograph.  At the commencement ceremony, Bland noted that Zak's mother, sister, and brother as well as three aunts, three uncles and three cousins are also Cornell alumni. 

Of the four, Nate Ford has traveled farthest, in pursuit of his dream to play baseball professionally.  Ford, who was named athlete of the year by the Cornell Daily Sun, is now catcher for the Malvern Braves, a league team based in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. "If all goes well down here, I will be back in the States for spring training, which should be pretty fun," he said.  He has tried out with both the New York Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies, and expects to participate in spring training with the Mets.

At Cornell, Ford excelled in both baseball and football.  With his roommate Bleymaier, Ford was a co-captain of the varsity football team and was captain of the division champion baseball team.   He was starting football quarterback for three years, passing for 2,815 yards in 2008, the second highest mark at Cornell in a single season.  He "led the Ivy League in both passing and total offense, raking 12th and eighth nationally in those categories," according to the Cornell Athletics web site.   On the baseball team, he had a career batting average that was 2nd highest in the history of Cornell baseball.  Ford is from Palo Alto, California, and his parents traveled from there to most home games in Ithaca.

Bland noted that in the entire week leading up to the 2007 Princeton football game, Ford was on crutches.  "When the game started, he limped onto the field and completed all of his first 14 pass attempts," Bland said, throwing "for 2 touchdowns and limping to another before his injuries forced him to the sidelines."    Bland also recalled a baseball doubleheader against Penn in which Cornell needed to win both games to stay in the fight for the division championship.  Ford drove in the winning runs in the bottom of the 9th inning in both games and Cornell went on to win the championship.

"I haven't really got to apply my ORIE and Cornell experience as my job is baseball for now," Ford said, "but the work ethic and determination that were necessary for that has translated onto the field.   Also, when I tell my teammates I am a Cornell Engineer, they are pretty impressed," he added.