Marilyn Basanta is the first in her family to go to college. From Peru and Cuba, her parents settled in Texas where her dad worked for the city of Dallas before he retired and her mom has gone back to school to be a hairstylist.
Moving 1,500 miles from home was tough, at first, says Marilyn. “That first semester I called home a lot,” she says. “I was really miserable, but Ithaca really grows on you. You learn to love this place and the people that are here.”
Landing a co-op job at Raytheon last semester helped too, says Marilyn. She commuted from her parents’ house to the company’s McKinney, Texas, plant where she developed her own project—writing a program that enters information into a database for engineers, saving them time and eliminating errors. “I put some automations in place that saved the company thousands of dollars,” she says. “I’m glad I left my impact on the corporation in a couple months. It gave me a better idea of what I want to do in the future.”
Marilyn went to a magnet school for math and science and attributes her technological bent to her parents’ gift of a computer when she was in 6th grade. Marilyn said that while the preponderance of male students isn’t so great in her Operations Research classes, it can be in some other engineering classes, but that doesn’t bother her. “I liked coming in as a woman in engineering,” she says. “I liked being one of the few.”
Although students might be more excited to take courses pertaining to their major, Marilyn says core classes, like math, physics, and chemistry, are the most important. She studied the same basic subjects in high school, but Marilyn says at Cornell she has delved much deeper into the material. “The way you learn in college is completely different,” she says. “The problems in high school are very standard, from the book. Here, they give you problems you actually have to think about. It pushes you a step further.”
Marilyn recommends finding a good group of study partners and sticking with them. “If you come in here and expect you’re going to do all engineering work by yourself, that’s so wrong,” she says. “Try different approaches and figure out what works best for you. What worked in high school is not going to necessarily work in college.”
After struggling at first, academically, Marilyn considered transferring to another school, but she is glad now she didn’t. “After looking at other schools, I still think that this place is probably the best place that I could be,” she says. “It takes a while to get comfortable here, but once you are, you can definitely shine.”
