I visited Ithaca last weekend to check out the computer science department at Cornell. I didn’t get there early enough to go on the campus tour, but what I saw of the compus was quite nice. It was snowing most of the time I was there, so I didn’t take too many pictures, but I did get a couple of nice shots from my hotel window.

The computer science department seems pretty great as well. I got to meet a few of my heroes (Jon Kleinberg, Dexter Kozen, John Hopcroft, etc.), but more than that the department seemed to really emphasize collaboration. Everyone I talked to mentioned the fact that everybody knew each other and that professors and students from different research groups frequently work with each other.

I didn’t get to see quite as much of Ithaca as I would have liked, but it seems like a nice town. It feels several orders of magnitude larger than Northfield, and there seemed to be a particularly impressive array of restaurants and cafes. I got to eat at Moosewood which I gather is fairly well known, and there seemed to be more Thai restaurants near Cornell than there are restaurants of any variety in Northfield.

I’m still not particularly thrilled with the location of Ithaca – it’s an hour-and-a-half drive from the Syracuse airport, and there are no large cities close by (NYC is about 4.5 hours away). That said, there does seem to be a lot going on around Cornell and the students I talked to didn’t seem to feel particularly isolated.

In any case, I’m leaving to visit the University of Michigan tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how that goes.