"Think wide"

Solace, perhaps, for ILR students struggling with the school's required statistics course:  Jay Walker '77 didn't like it, either.

"Statistics was exceptionally hard.  I was not happy," said the man who has revolutionized the way many industries conduct commerce on the Internet.

Founder of businesses such as Priceline.com and considered one of the world's leading digital age pioneers, Walker is Cornell's 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year.

He will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday in the Statler Auditorium as part of the Entrepreneurship@Cornell's Celebration 2009.

After visiting a friend on campus in the early 1970s, Walker was hooked on enrolling at Cornell.

"This is what a school should look like," he recalled thinking.

"I liked the environment.  I felt Cornell had incredible range.  I was at Cornell for the education, not the degree," Walker said in an interview last week.

Although Walker found ILR courses such as those in Human Resource Studies "very useful for an entrepreneur," he also took advantage of Cornell's breadth.

Walker took courses in the Cornell Law School, Cornell School of Engineering and Cornell College of Arts and Sciences.

At the School of Hotel Administration, Walker was the only male in a class of 41 taking shorthand – a symbols-based system of speed writing.

Now chief of Walker Digital, which develops business models for customers in the casino, lottery, airline, vending, magazine and retail industries, said his electives choices made him an atypical ILR student.

"I was sort of a renegade … not a lot different than I am now," he said.

"Almost all the ILRies wanted to be lawyers, it was sort of the pre-law gathering place.  I wanted to hire lawyers, but never wanted to be one," said Walker, whose name is listed on hundreds of patents.

During his college years, he earned a pilot's license and co-authored 1,000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games with a student who lived across the hall.  Jeff Lehman went on to become president of Cornell.

At Cornell, Walker also met his future wife, an Arts and Sciences student who took a number of ILR courses.  Eileen Walker '76, MBA '78 is a newly elected alumni trustee who begins her term July 1.

Jay Walker dropped out of ILR for three semesters to start a weekly newspaper in Ithaca.

"I thought it would be a good way to make money," said Walker, who grew up in Yonkers and now lives in Stamford, Conn.

The Midweek Observer had a ready supply of free labor -- "students wanting to spruce up their resumes," he said.

The Ithaca Journal competed with the upstart publication by distributing a free weekly on the same day, Walker said, and the Observer closed.

At his father's behest, Walker returned to complete his final college semester.

Walker says he was "not a particularly good student," but wise in selecting from Cornell's academic abundance.

"I always viewed myself as the customer, I didn't buy anything I didn't want," he said.

Walker's advice to today's Cornell students – take advantage of the university's intellectual scope.

"They're in the middle of this enormous feast and you can eat anything.  Cornell offers phenomenal breadth," he said.

Also, learn to write.

"It's one of the most persuasive critical skills," he said.  "If you find the right professor and the right seminar, you can learn to write.  But, you've got to work at it."

Think about skills, he said.

Finally, realize careers have a way of veering from what you envisioned for yourself while in college and prepare yourself for the unexpected, he said.

"Think wide."