Moving is almost always a bittersweet experience.

Over the past week, my move from Ithaca back to California certainly erred more on the side of bitterness, and like many of my peers, I find it very difficult to believe that I am now a Cornell alumnus. But the four years have indeed come to an end, and I now sit in my room in Cupertino, wondering what graduating from the Hotel School would mean for me. In the process, I thought back to some of the advice that professors and mentors had given to me during my undergraduate career. It’s with great pleasure that I share some of that advice today with my fellow Cornell students and alumni.

Cornell central campus: a sight that I will dearly miss.

My thoughts did not lead to an inspirational guest speaker–though we have many who lecture at the Hotel School. Instead, I thought back to a Business Law class that I took with David Sherwyn, a professor in the Hotel School who graduated from Cornell with a law degree before I was born. David was perhaps the best lecturer I’d had in the Hotel School, and his class was among the top five that I’d taken.

David was admittedly no fashion plate. Each day, he came to class with a dark-colored, casual shirt, and he never wore a tie. If he was feeling dressy, he would wear a modest blazer or a thin jacket. David sported wrinkled, light-tan-colored khakis that had more pockets than I could count, and his pants would often have a drawstring at the top to keep them up. Not surprisingly, David’s footwear consisted of no more than a pair of sandals or Croc-like shoes. I don’t know how he survived during the winter. His hair was long and often unkempt, reaching halfway down the back his neck. My peers and I knew (and respected) him as the most casual-dressing faculty member in the Hotel School, a place where tacit dress codes required everyone to look better than at other colleges within Cornell.

I remember once, while I was on the fifth-floor hallway of Statler Hall, David was walking past Professor Kwortnik, the Executive Director of the Center for Hospitality Research. Kwortnik was wearing a full suit and tie (as he often did), and as they walked by each other, David quipped, “is that the clip-on today?” Kwortnik chuckled and tried to kick him but missed. It was all too evident to all of us that David despised formal clothing. He dressed with ease.

In class, David spoke with ease–not just that it was easy for him to talk, but he was remarkably easy to listen to. This was no small feat: easy listening is damn hard lecturing. David lectured as if he was having a casual conversation with each student. He cracked jokes, made fun of past clients, and uttered the occasional swearword. He told stories and went on intriguing tangents that somehow would link back to the course material. And he vowed never to use PowerPoint (a promise that he kept throughout the entire semester), which required each student to take copious notes. None of us minded, though, as David somehow found a way to make dry law material interesting.

On the last day of class, David strode into the third-floor lecture hall in his usual casual outfit and took us through some sexual discrimination cases. The end of class, however, he reserved for a story. It was the story of his early career path.

David graduated from Cornell and took a well-paid job at a prestigious law firm in Chicago. In the mornings, he would walk to work every day from his car (parked many blocks away from his office) through alleys where the freezing, bitter Chicago wind would whisk away any heat that his jackets could hold. As he entered his office building covered in snow and shivering, he would step into an elevator that he would share with senior partners in the firm. While David brushed off snow from his wind-ravaged coats, the partners (who conveniently had privileged parking directly underneath the building) would be dry and warm; during the short elevator ride they would share small talk.

One day, David conversed with one of his fellow associates at the firm. They spoke about the number of years they would have to wait until becoming partners, and then David calculated the number of partners currently in the firm and when they would retire. After all, there could only be a limited number of partners, and everyone would need to wait their turn for consideration. David and his colleague ran the calculations and found, to their horror, that they would likely be working for several more decades before becoming partners. “Dude,” said David as he looked up in dismay to his friend, “by the time we become partners, we’ll basically be dead.”

So, against the advice of his superiors and his family, David quit his job. And he became unemployed.

David found an opportunity in Ithaca. It was neither a prestigious nor a large law firm. In fact, it was very much a small, risky start-up: a group with no more than five attorneys who were looking to form a law practice where they saw opportunity. When David sent his potential partners his resume, they bit it. Literally–they took a bite out of it to make sure that it was real. And, upon meeting them, he was hired on the spot. But why, submitted David to our class, did he leave a high-paying job with a prestigious firm to join a ragtag group of lawyers in Upstate New York? It went against all logic.

His answer to our class remains with me today. “Your degree from Cornell will allow you to take risks,” said David. He had worked with other associates who had graduated from B-list universities: decent educations but not as rigorous. According to David, those associates could not afford to abruptly quit their jobs and to work for a start-up. If they failed, David said, other potential employers would look at their resumes and think, what in the world were you doing? “But,” David said, “your education here in Cornell will allow you to take risks, to make mistakes, and to get up and move onward without difficulty.” He urged our class to understand that the words “Cornell University” on a resume were not to be taken lightly: a candidate graduating from this institution would be expected to understand the value of taking risks–and to take them when appropriate.