Sonica Li visited Cornell to check out its systems engineering program, but when she found out the college doesn’t have that as an undergraduate major, she chose Big Red anyway. “I visited four schools and I liked Cornell the best,” she says. “When I visited all the other schools, they didn’t seem as pretty, or as laid back. I just got a good vibe from the people when I came here.
“I really like that it’s in a small town,” she says. “I could have gone to Georgia Tech but it’s in the middle of Atlanta and scary.”
Li chose operations research for its similarities to systems engineering, but later changed to electrical engineering before settling on computer science.
Before she came to Cornell, Li says she could not have imagined studying computer science, because she did not like computers. “What I didn’t realize was that computer science doesn’t have all that much to do with working on computers. It’s more theoretical,” she says. “It was really my freshman year CS100 class that convinced me to do computer science because it was so much fun.”
Now she’s T.A.’ing computer science courses, facilitating the Academic Excellence Workshop for CS100, and is the social chair for the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates. After submitting her resume at a job fair on campus, she landed an summer internship at Cisco in San Jose, Calif. “A lot of my friends will be there too,” she says. “Companies really love Cornell engineering students. Microsoft, Amazon, Google—they all want to move us to the West Coast.”
Unlike her high school classmates, who were very competitive, Li says Cornell students help each other out. “The CS majors here are not cutthroat at all. We’re all buddy buddy,” she says. “We bounce ideas off of each other on homework assignments and we all commiserate after a hard test.”
Her sophomore year, Li lived on North Campus in the JAM (Just About Music) program house. She plays piano and guitar and likes to sing musical theatre, but it was the luck of the draw that landed her there. Her winning a Rock Band contest with engineering band mates in a group dubbed Jammstein was all about skill, however. “It was really nice seeing all the engineers out there rocking out,” says Li.
This summer, Li plans to start a real band with other interns in California. She’s still looking for a drummer, but that shouldn’t take long. “One of the great things about Cornell is it’s so big you can’t stop meeting people,” says Li. “At every meeting and event I always meet someone new.”
Li says it has been surprisingly easy to pursue extracurricular activities while keeping up with her schoolwork. “They do say that Cornell professors try to give you as much work as possible, but I don’t think it’s that bad, she says. “I think all of the CS professors that I know are just really great.”
