Step out of your sphere, says Miss Finger Lakes

Senior Daniela Routt poses in front of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where she has the top GPA in her class. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Linda Myers

The Miss America pageant is not about beauty, said Daniela Routt. The senior in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations with the enormous green eyes and lashes to match was the winner of the 1999 Miss Finger Lakes title, the first awarded in this region of New York.

Rather, it's about talent and commitment to ideas that promote community service, and -- most people don't realize this -- "is one of the largest providers of scholarships for women in the world," said Routt, who is from Clifton Park, N.Y. ("near Albany") and was awarded $500 toward her studies from the pageant before being halted at the state level last year.

Talent can count for up to 40 percent of a contestant's grade, and the interview, in which entrants discuss their "platform issue, a subject that we are passionate about and have done work in the community about," counts for 30 percent. Routt, who has been studying the flute for 14 years and plays in the Cornell Wind Symphony and Symphonic Band, performed Mozart's Sonata in B flat for flute as her talent component. In her platform speech she talked about building on a foundation of diversity, a topic she learned something about as a Rotary exchange student and U.S. Youth Ambassador to Bolivia before coming to Cornell. She now lives at the Latino Living Center on campus and has been a center member since her freshman year. "It's taught me a lot about different kinds of Latino cultures," she said, plus "it's like a family -- warm and inviting."

As Miss Finger Lakes, she has given talks about her platform issue throughout the Finger Lakes to such groups as the Lions Club in Watkins Glen and the Rotary in Elmira. "People are confined to their own world. I tried to emphasize that diversity doesn't mean going out and loving everyone," but rather "stepping out of your normal sphere of life and seeing the world differently by broadening your experience, whether it's volunteering at a soup kitchen or taking up a foreign language." (Routt speaks five languages, among them Portuguese and Spanish.)

Routt, whose reign as Miss Finger Lakes ended this April, spent time last summer handling pageant responsibilities while working on campus, but otherwise has barely paused from her studies, maintaining a staggering course load of 21 to 25 credits every semester to graduate this May, after three years. At the top of her class at the ILR School, with the highest GPA, she was president of the Cornell chapter of the Golden Key National Honor Society and will be the degree marshal for the school at Commencement. She won a service learning award from Cornell's Public Service Center for Esperanza, a plan for an after-school homework assistance program aimed at Latino students at Beverly J. Martin elementary school in Ithaca. She co-authored the proposal with ILR assistant professor of organizational behavior Michael Lounsbury, a faculty fellow in service. She also is a winner of the ILR School's 2000 Daniel Alpern Memorial Prize, for leadership and academic excellence, and the Irving M. Ives Award for a student demonstrating good faith, integrity, responsibility, cooperativeness and good will.

Routt, who plans eventually to study international law, advises other Cornell students interested in competing in future Miss Finger Lakes scholarship pageants: "Don't let anyone try to talk you out of it. It will take you into the community and add to your experience."