When Rubin Dai arrived at Cornell in January 2026, he never expected he would end up spending hours of time tinkering with old computers. A friend invited him to check out the Cornell Computer Reuse Association. CCRA is a student group that refurbishes and recycles used tech, to give it a new life in the hands of a student or community group.

CCRA donates the computers they fix far and wide—from the firehouse in Ithaca to classrooms in Zambia.

Used tech comes from Cornell and from individuals in the community. Some of the machines are broken, some need software updates, and some are older models the donors no longer use. CCRA volunteers take these old computers (that would otherwise end up as e-waste), fix them, and pass them along to people and organizations that need them.

Rubin still recalls his first time walking into the CCRA room and seeing students hunkered down over motherboards, monitors, and other hardware.

“Realizing that every machine in that room was going to end up with someone who actually needed it—that mattered to me,” he says. “I like to picture a kid in Zambia opening up a laptop I set up. You don't always get to see the end of the story, but you know it's out there.”

Rubin says CCRA has afforded him the opportunity and resources to learn how to fix computers. He has spent hours taking computers apart and putting them back together, tinkering with them till they work again.

Rubin is an exchange student in his junior year at the University of Sydney in Australia. His experience with CCRA has motivated him to look for a job in industry, preferably working with his hands to make a difference.

“I want to build things that real people use,” he says. “That said, I'm keeping an open mind. Life has a way of redirecting you, and my time with CCRA has reminded me that some of the best experiences come from things you didn't plan for.”

Learn more about Cornell’s new Sustainable Computing Working Group, which is working to advance sustainable computing across campus.