As a senior at an all-male Catholic prep school, Samuel Fanfan didn’t look at Cornell until one of his teachers nudged him. “I had a professor who said, ‘You need to go somewhere that’s going to challenge you,’ so I thought, ‘Why not?’” he says.
Coming from just outside Newark, N.J., Samuel fell in love with Cornell when he first visited the campus for a Diversity Hosting Weekend. “Seeing all the green and vast open spaces, it was eye-opening for me,” he says. “And the people I met during that weekend, they made the time really fun for me.”
Samuel has found the challenge he was looking for at Cornell, and then some. “I didn’t think I would ever have to work this hard in my life,” he says. “If I had known it was going to be this hard, I still would have come, but with a different perspective.”
As an RA on North Campus, an assistant in the college’s pre-freshmen program, and a peer mentor for the diversity program, Samuel does his best to instill that perspective in incoming students. “When I talk to prospective students, I tell them, ‘Don’t be fooled. You can have fun, but it’s difficult,” he says. “You have to stay focused from day one.”
Though it’s not easy, Samuel says Cornell offers lots of help, as long as you take the initiative to seek it out. “Freshman year, one of my biggest problems academically was that I wasn’t comfortable seeking help,” he says. “I would just stay up late trying to figure out problem sets. Now I’m a lot more comfortable going to office hours and talking to professors.”
Through MentorNet, the E-Mentoring Network for Diversity in Engineering and Science, Samuel has a mentor of his own—a lab administrator at an HP plant in New Jersey. Via e-mail, Samuel is able to get the inside scoop from his mentor about what it’s like to work in industry.
Samuel is a member of the LINK: Men’s Alliance, a support network for male black and Latino students; the National Society of Black Engineers; and the Cornell Caribbean Students Association Dance Ensemble. He says getting involved in student activities is a good way to meet a broad spectrum of people you might not otherwise meet. But he warns that trying to do too many things at once can be bad for your grades. “My second semester last year I was involved in 10 different groups and after getting my GPA, I have learned to focus on two or three,” he says.
All in all, Samuel says he has learned a lot more than engineering at Cornell. “It’s not only taught me humility, it’s just helped me to grow so many ways independently,” he says. “It’s opened my eyes to the world.”
