I’d been home for a week when I met up with two other Pitt students from the FAME group in Pittsburgh. It was summer, so we met in the city rather than on campus. Within about ten minutes, all three of us had said the same thing, none of us prompted by the others: the…
Author: Eraste
Hello, I'm Eraste Boko from Pittsburgh PA, I'm a third-year student studying Computer Engineering with a minor in Space Engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering. When I graduate in December 2027, I look forward to getting my master’s in Embedded Systems.
One Visa, Eight Countries
It was my first trip out of France, a bus to Belgium, about six hours. I had my papers ready. I assumed we’d pull over somewhere, everyone would get off, and somebody would look at my visa. That’s what a border is. When I take the Greyhound from Montreal to Pittsburgh, in New York, the…
They Locked Us In and Took Away the Delivery Apps
ENSEACK was my fourth hackathon and the first one I couldn’t leave. At the three I’d done in Montreal and in the US, you could go home at two in the morning, or order food, or at least walk somewhere. At ENSEA you were locked in for nineteen hours. Nobody had warned us to bring…
Learning My First Language Again
It was lunchtime on a Tuesday in the student lounge at ENSEA, three weeks into the semester. Someone asked what I thought about young graduates struggling to find work. It isn’t a hard question, and I had plenty to say about it. But the sentence was assembling itself in the wrong language, and what came…
Why France
I’ve moved countries three times, and each move changed which language I lived in. I was born in the Republic of Benin, a small country in West Africa, and schooled in French there through ninth grade. In tenth grade, I switched to a Nigerian school, where the curriculum was in English. In 2018, I left…