(KTNV) — John Cooke, a sophomore at Harvard University, has a message for any young person in the Las Vegas Valley with a dream.
"Truly, anything is possible," Cooke says. "Coming from my background — I come from a low income to middle class background — I know that if you have a dream, you can absolutely achieve it."
At just 19, the Rancho High School graduate was recently elected as the co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate Association, the school's student government body.
He's studying government and history at Harvard, one of the toughest schools in the nation to get into.
For much of his childhood, Cooke said he dreamed of attending the Air Force Academy. That made sense because he comes from a military family here in the valley.
When the racial justice protests of 2020 came along, however, Cooke decided to change his planned path.
"Being a Black man, a lot of stuff that occurs in law and government has really disadvantaged people like me for the last couple of hundred years in this country," Cooke said. "With all the racial reckoning things happening in the United States in 2020, I really realized I wanted to be an advocate for my community through the law."
Cooke told us he hasn't gotten used to the cold east coast weather yet, but that he's proud that he's making a name for himself at Harvard.
He hopes to later attend law school there before returning back to Las Vegas to work in the legal profession.
"The [coursework] is pretty difficult here, it's a hop, skip and a jump from high school," Cooke said. "I'm a first-generation college student, so I didn't have a lot of that support that some college students have when their parents have been through this rodeo before. It was a balancing act at first, but I think I've done it pretty well."
Cooke, who previously had an internship with Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto's office in Washington, D.C., said he hopes to get an internship at the White House this summer
