College of Agriculture and Life Sciencesalum Scott Zuchorski ’97 first visited Cornell as a child accompanying his father, a ‘69 graduate from CALS who returned to campus for the annual Seeley Conference every summer and the occasional football game. During these visits Scott, a native of Cobleskill, N.Y., fell in love with the campus and eventually attended Cornell as well, majoring in rural sociology in what later became the Department of Developmental Sociology.
Now Scott has returned to campus once again, this time as the Spring 2015 executive in residence for the Cornell Program in Infrastructure Policy.
“Scott is a terrific contributor,” said CPIP Executive Director John Foote. “The added benefit is that he’s a Cornellian. He comes from a line of Cornellians. He gets the university. He loves being back. And students enjoy hearing about how he got from rural sociology to his career on Wall Street.”
The program is focused on improving the delivery, maintenance and operation of physical infrastructure through dedicated teaching, research and outreach efforts. CPIP taps into Cornell’s expansive stable of engineers, economists, planners and policy experts to bring an interdisciplinary approach to solving infrastructure problems, according to Foote, who established the program with Associate Professor and CPIP Director Rick Geddes. The curriculum is likewise designed for a wide array of students across campus, always with an eye towards maintaining real-world relevance.
“One of the hallmarks of CPIP is this is not an ivory tower academic exercise,” Foote said. “We’re trying to address real-world problems that policy makers and politicians are wrestling with today.”
That focus made Zuchorski a perfect fit for the program.
A member of CPIP’s advisory board, Zuchorski has had a diverse range of professional experience. He received his Master’s of Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, and started a career as a senior consultant with Arthur Andersen’s Office of Government Services in Washington D.C. That was followed by a brief stint at the U.S. General Accounting Office. After eight years as first vice president at Ambac Assurance Corp. in New York City, Zuchorski shifted his focus to project finance. For nearly five years he has served as senior director of global infrastructure and project finance at Fitch Ratings, where he covers a variety of transportation and infrastructure transactions. He is also the co-lead of Fitch’s U.S. Transportation team.
As executive in residence at CPIP, Zuchorski is visiting campus three times this semester, giving guest lectures and informal talks, mentoring students and discussing curriculum issues with faculty. During his most recent visit on March 2, he spoke to Foote’s infrastructure finance course about the role of credit ratings in the capital markets. Later in the day he gave an informal talk to graduate students from AAP’s Department of City and Regional Planning about the increasing use of managed lanes in the U.S. and how the financing of such projects are analyzed.
Zuchorski, for his part, said he is thrilled to be back on the campus that expanded his worldview nearly 20 years ago.
“A place like Cornell just opens your world to so many other elements,” Zuchorski said. He noted that as a student he took classes throughout the university, including a semester as part of the Cornell in Washington Program, “just to get different experiences.”
In addition to instilling in him a desire to pursue work with a public purpose behind it, Scott also credits CALS with fostering his critical thinking skills, which serve him well in his role at Fitch.
“In managing a team of credit analysts today, I try to emphasize to them that we’re not reporters simply reciting numbers and statistics to our constituents,” he said. “We try to be forward-looking and ask questions like ‘why?’ That’s one of the major things that I took out of the coursework that I had, delving deeper and being able to ask probing questions rather than taking things at face value.”
Zuchorski, who now lives in Westchester County, hopes that after his residency ends he won’t have to wait so long to return to campus. He’s already thinking about bringing this three kids – ages 5, 7, 10 – to Ithaca to see a lacrosse or hockey game, hoping they too will catch the Big Red bug.
“I couldn’t have had a better experience here. I loved it. I didn’t want to leave,” he said with a laugh. “And yet it took me 15 years to come back.”
David Nutt is a writer for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
