Jake Rudock is a senior at St. Thomas Aquinas High in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. He balances a course load that includes advanced-placement courses in macroeconomics and statistics as well as Honors courses in world literature and physics. He turned down offers at Harvard and Princeton.

Instead, he will attend the University of Iowa to pursue his pre-medicine interests.

And as the prized quarterback of the Hawkeyes’ 2011 recruiting class, he’ll be on a football scholarship.

Ask Rudock to tell you about his accolades — academic or athletics — and he probably won’t talk much. Academically, his success is reflective of a philosophy ingrained in his household. As he said, “Everything comes down to education.”

His father is a lawyer. His oldest brother attends medical school at Miami (Fla.). His sister graduated from Florida State with a master’s degree. His other brother is currently at Florida.

And perhaps his biggest academic influence — his mother — also received a master’s degree and is a second-grade teacher.

As Rudock puts it, she’s the one who’s really “on his butt” about school.

“My mom challenges me and tells me, ‘Hey, you have to do these certain thing because in the end, that’s all you got,’ ” he said.

Athletically, Rudock has relied on an even-keel approach. Bob Rudock, Jake’s father, describes his son as “very unassuming” and said he “takes nothing for granted.”

“He’s just another kid in the school at St. Thomas,” Bob Rudock said.

Those qualities might be rare in an 18-year-old who led his high-school team to a national No. 1 ranking this past season, let alone a 15-0 record and a state championship. But for one example, Jake’s father points to his traditional unspectacular post-touchdown pass routine. (He recorded 36 of those in 2010.)

“I’ve never seen him go running down the field congratulating everybody or anything like that,” Bob Rudock said. “He’ll run right over to the sideline. He’ll shake hands with the coaches. Then he waits for the rest of the kids to come off the field, and he goes out to greet and congratulate them.”

So what the Hawkeyes have in Jake Rudock is a calm and collected quarterback who typically declines to talk about himself. That description may remind some of another signal-caller who recently wrapped up his career for the Black and Gold — Ricky Stanzi.

Tom Kakert, a recruiting analyst and publisher of hawkeyereport.com, said Jake Rudock’s physical build is reminiscent of Stanzi, circa 2006.

Stanzi was listed at 6-4, 193 pounds. Rudock is 6-3, 190.

“[Stanzi] had to fill out and put on weight and get stronger,” Kakert said. “We see Stanzi now and he’s physically NFL size. I think that’s kind of what you’ll see with Jake. He’ll put on 30 pounds of muscle in the next two years and really be a solid QB for Iowa down the road.”

Iowa coaches often attributed a large part of Stanzi’s career progression to his unrivaled work ethic.

“You don’t want to act like you’re the best because you’re not at all by any means,” he said. “You just have to keep working and working.

“When you’re not working, someone else is.”