Mark Yatskar's high school guidance counselor steered him toward Cornell because Yatskar was interested in robotics and Cornell has a top-rated electrical and computer engineering program. But Yatskar has many other interests and he's been able to explore those here, too.

Yatskar has sat in on several classes, learning more about linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. "I can go to any class and no one will bother me," he says. "It's been a huge plus because I've done a lot of different things here."

Even though he's not majoring in the subject, Yatskar has also been able to take dance classes at Cornell, participating in several productions. "The dance program here is very open," he says. "It's a fairly welcoming program."

With his roommate and another friend, Yatskar took a year off to develop CourseTopia, a course scheduling software in use at Rutgers University, the University of Florida and others. They were motivated by their frustration with Schedulizer, a competing product also developed by Cornell students. "I tried to use it and stuff seemed wrong so I stopped," says Yatskar. "The biggest difference is the searching. With CourseTopia you can search by description, professor, any type of field like credits. And we updated the whole user interface, which is a big plus."

For now they are offering CourseTopia for free to selected schools, but they hope to generate enough momentum to draw interest in the business. So far, the feedback has been positive. "We did some marketing to students at Rutgers and some felt compelled to walk up and tell us how good it was," he says. "I felt like they wanted what we had and that was cool."

Back in school, Yatskar collaborated with Computer Science Professor Lillian Lee and Yahoo! researcher Bo Pang Ph.D. '06 CS on a project using statistical natural language processing, or NLP. They analyzed language found on the Web in an attempt to teach computers to summarize text automatically. "NLP is important to searching because when you process free text, you want to know what it means," says Yatskar. "And if you can say more interesting things about what it means, you might be able to devise more interesting ways to search it."

When he's not dancing or teaching computers how to understand language, Yatskar likes to spend time outdoors. "Go kayaking on the lake," he advises. "That's great. When it's warm in the fall and the spring, it's better to be here than anywhere."