Aero alum helps others soar

Growing up in Muskegon, Michigan during NASA’s heyday in the 1970s, Adnan Rukieh (BSE Aero ’81) dreamed of studying aerospace engineering. He was able to realize this dream, becoming the first member of his family to graduate from college thanks to a State of Michigan academic scholarship based on high school performance and financial need.

Now, decades after he earned his aerospace engineering degree from Michigan Engineering, Rukieh and his wife Becky Folds are helping U-M students achieve their aerospace goals.

Aerospace undergraduate students will get important scholarship support from the Adnan Rukieh and Becky Folds Endowed Scholarship Fund. The scholarship will be given annually to a first-generation student studying aerospace engineering to defray costs and provide experiential student opportunities.

“The scholarship I received covered my tuition, but even then, as a first-gen student, some experiences were hard to partake in financially,” Rukieh said. “I could tell there was a gap between me and my classmates whose parents had gone to college. I knew there was information—and experiences—I was missing.”

“Our intent was funding and endowing a scholarship to alleviate the issues many first-gen students face,” Folds said. “They have enough to worry about bridging the gap to college, starting a challenging engineering curriculum and so many unknown factors. Cost and financial aid should not be something that they should worry about. We want to take one element of concern off the table for them.

“We find ourselves at a place where we’ve thought hard about how we want to give back and what we want our legacy to be. Our undergraduate experiences were so foundational for both of us that we wanted to help others receive the same foundation we’ve had. There are a lot of things we could have done, but this was very meaningful for us.”

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