Ruke has always been interested in engineering. “I have two older brothers who are both engineers. But I was always into appliances, opening up the VCR to see how it worked,” he says. “Now I’m mainly doing computers.”
His most interesting class so far has been ENG 230, Introduction to Digital Logic Design. “It was basically the building blocks of computers, Boolean algebra.” he says. “We built a processor and an ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit).”
“I do research with Professor Sally McKee,” Ruke continues, “and I would say that’s the most fun thing. Over the summer, my first big project was translating a program written in Visual Basic into C. It didn’t seem hard at first, but it was, since it was written in Excel by someone who wasn’t exactly a programmer.”
Ruke also likes the excellence of his non-engineering classes. “My Writing Seminars were pretty interesting, especially Alternative Genders and Alternative Sexualities. It was anthropology about a subject that’s not generally talked about.”
Having moved to Kentucky from Nigeria six years ago, Ruke has had a few surprises at Cornell--his first winter started much warmer than he expected. “And also the amount of stuff I’ve learned. When I envisioned four years in college I really had no idea how I would be prepared to work at the end of it, since four years in high school don’t really prepare you for anything.”
He describes the atmosphere at Cornell as studious but friendly. “It’s easy to form random study groups,” he says. “I spend most of my time in Duffield Hall, where people are there to do what they have to do, but overall, it’s pretty laid back, except at prelims, when things get pretty stressful.
“My biggest advice is to be open to learning because the more you want to learn the more you can learn. Even if your grades aren’t always as high as you’d expect you’ll find you’ve learned more than you realized. If people come to school to learn, Cornell is a great place to get an education.”
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