Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, until November 1874 at the start of the second term. Cornell University The young Anna Botsford's first year at Cornell (1874) was tempestuous. Upon arriving at Cornell, Comstock found that she had to take several examinations in order to enter, and particularly needed tutoring in German. She also lived at a boarding house with several other students, and maintained an active social life. Botsford's course work included both botany and zoology with corresponding laboratory periods in both. When she returned to Cornell in 1875, she was part of the first group of thirty-three young women to move into the newly built Sage College on campus. During the winter semester of 1875, she took an entomology class with John Henry Comstock, who was just two years into his career as a university lecturer. Their friendship bloomed into a romance and marriage (October 7, 1878) and she quietly withdrew from student life to that of the responsibilities of a young professor's wife at the fledgling university. The new Mrs. Comstock illustrated her husband's entomological papers and assisted him with the details of his research and work as an entomologist to the U. S. Department of Agriculture (1879-1881) in Washington, D.C. Upon their return to Ithaca and academic life at Cornell in 1881, Comstock was determined to "...go back to the University and take the course in science which my husband had taken, and get my degree." Comstock received her diploma from the hands of Cornell President Andrew D. White in June 1885. Comstock became a member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority (November 4, 1882), and she was one of the first women elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi at Cornell in 1888. Career Throughout her life, Comstock illustrated her husband's lectures and publications on insects. She had no formal training in this illustration; she would study an insect under a microscope then draw it. While her husband was chief entomologist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1879 to 1881, she prepared the drawings for his 1880 Report of the Entomologist on citrus scale insects. She then reentered Cornell and received a degree in natural history in 1885. She studied wood engraving at Cooper Union, New York City, so she could prepare illustrations for her husband's book Introduction to Entomology in 1888. Also in 1888, she was one of the first four women