“This is exciting, and it’s beginning to feel real,” said Jones. “I have Project ENGAGES to thank for getting me a long way down the road. It really helped me determine the direction I want to go in.”
When she was a young child, Jones imagined what it would be like to be a doctor, because she loved the idea of helping people with their health care needs, and because it incorporated two of her favorite subjects, math and science. But there was one critical drawback to her daydream, something that gnawed at her.
“I had to be realistic,” she says. “I don’t like to deal with or see blood, and that’s a huge disadvantage for anyone who thinks they want to be a doctor.”
So she began exploring different career paths as she immersed herself in the engineering class at Benjamin Mays High School in Atlanta.
“I learned about biomedical engineering,” she says. “My high school biology teacher told me about Project ENGAGES, and it sounded like a great opportunity.”
She applied, got accepted into the program, and for two years during high school, her junior and senior years, Brianna was part of a Project ENGAGES cohort based in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working in the lab of Andrés García.
Through García, she learned about a summer pre-college engineering program at Hampton, and she’s been able to establish relationships with faculty there, something she’s managed to with self-assurance, “because I felt prepared, thanks to Project ENGAGES, which immersed me in different environments with different people,” Jones says. “It gave me the confidence I need to go out and make my way in the real world of science and research – it helped me establish a networking system.”
This fall at Hampton (a private, historical black university in Hampton, Virginia), she’ll begin pursuit of her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering. After that, she plans to get a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering.
The UNCF STEM Scholars Program is a 10-year initiative designed to identify and provide scholarships and academic support for a total of 500 African American high school students who aspire to earn STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) degrees and pursue careers in STEM fields.
Scholars receive up to $2,500 per academic year for freshmen and sophomores, $5,000 for juniors, seniors, and fifth-year students. Scholarships are renewable for five years, and also include a $5,000 stipend based on a STEM-related project or internship.
“Ultimately, I’d like to have an impact on improving health care and helping patients,” Jones says, adding, “but not deal with the blood!”
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Natasha Stallings is on a personal quest to cure breast cancer, and it’s taking her from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., where she’ll study at George Washington University beginning this fall. But the former Project ENGAGES student’s journey included an important, recent stopover in Chicago, where she participated in a panel discussion with former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, at the KPMG Women’s Leadership Summit.
“What an amazing whirlwind,” said Stallings, trying to wrap her mind around everything that has happened to her the past two years.
Stallings, who graduated in May from KIPP Collegiate High School in Atlanta, spent the past two years in the Project ENGAGES program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, doing breast cancer research in the lab of Krishnendu Roy, a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (which is headquarters for Project ENGAGES).
This spring, Stallings got what might be the most important phone call of her life so far. She knew what she wanted to do, but didn’t have the resources to make it happen.
“I’d been stressing about how I was going to pay for school,” she said.
She’d applied for the KPMG Future Leaders Program, which supports growth opportunities for top female high school seniors across the country, through college scholarships and leadership training. But she hadn’t heard anything. Meanwhile, her high school classmates and fellow ENGAGES students at Georgia Tech were getting good news about scholarships and college plans.
“Everybody else was excited, and I wanted to be happy, but I thought I’d be in debt for the rest of my life,” she said. “It was really weighing on me. Then I got the call, and it was like a huge weight had been lifted off of me. I started crying immediately.”
Tears of joy. The KPMG scholarship will pay for GWU and allow Stallings to continue her research in college. That’s important, because Stallings is serious about wanting to change outcomes for women battling breast cancer. She knows the scenario from first-hand experience.
Stallings entered Project ENGAGES the summer of 2016, not long after her mother, Katherine, was diagnosed with stage three triple negative breast cancer. As the youngest of four children, she was the only one still living at home.
“I was there for the whole process, the chemotherapy, the radiation,” she said. “I shaved my mother’s head for her. It’s hard seeing someone you love go through that experience. I was going to stay home that summer and take care of her, but she kept encouraging me to go get a job. Then I remembered seeing this flyer at school for Project ENGAGES the week before. The application was due in three days.”
After interviewing with Manu Platt, co-founder and co-director of Project ENGAGES, and Lakeita Servance, who manages the program, “I felt like it was meant to be.”
She was selected as part of the cohort of students (from six Atlanta area high schools that serve predominantly African-American populations) that began in 2016, and found a perfect lab mentor in Alexandra Atalis, a graduate student and researcher in the Roy lab.
“I still vividly remember Natasha from her interview with me during the ENGAGES mentor selection process,” Atalis recalled. “She spoke with a lot of energy and passion. We shared a very similar story, with both of our mothers having battled cancer. She was inspired to work in the biomedical industry to help cancer patients, which was also my motivation.”
Together, Stallings and Atalis worked on research entitled, “Investigating Inflammatory Markers That Stimulate Breast Cancer Metastasis Into Lymphatics.” Basically, they were identifying immunological signaling molecules that induce or inhibit breast cancer cell migration.
“I couldn’t just leave this research, because this is a passion,” Stallings said. “So I’m taking my research to George Washington University. I’m really excited that it didn’t just end with my Project ENGAGES experience.”
Long range, who knows? But Stallings has given it some thought.
“She is a big dreamer,” said Atalis. “We would talk a lot about her college and career aspirations and she had a lot of great ideas, mostly centered around helping patients. What helps her stand out is her ability to empathize and connect with others. That is what will help her go far.”
Someday, she’d like to start a rehabilitation center for patients undergoing chemotherapy. And though she’s considered working in the biomedical industry, Stallings is thinking now that she’d like to pursue a career in medicine.
“I know that I want to have patient interaction,” said Stallings, who would like to somehow combine her research skills with whatever clinical future may be waiting.
That future, supported by the KPMG scholarship, will continue taking shape at Stanford University (July 15-17), where she’ll meet the 19 other KPMG scholars from across the country at the annual KPMG Future Leaders Retreat. And as the nation was celebrating Independence Day, Stallings was still glowing from her experience the week before, in Chicago, with Condoleezza Rice, KPMG’s ambassador for the leadership program.
Part of the program included the premiere of a video about Stallings, produced by KPMG (and shot in Atlanta), as well as a speech from Rice, and opportunities to meet other KPMG scholars.
“It was incredible,” said Stallings. “The video came together perfectly, Condoleezza Rice’s speech was so empowering and inspirational, and it was really great to see the other girls and learn their stories. My mother loved the whole experience. I mean, to get off the plane and have a car waiting for you? We felt like royalty.”
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This year, ENGAGES leadership outdid itself, bringing two of the nation’s most influential leaders in their respective fields to the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience in the past month.
First, Myrtle Potter, named one of Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women in Business three times, shared the story of her rise to becoming one of the nation’s foremost healthcare leaders and innovators at a special event in April. Then, at the annual ENGAGES Senior Celebration on May 7, Raphael Lee, a pioneering and entrepreneurial surgeon, researcher, and biomedical engineer gave the keynote address.
“The success of this program is critically important for all of us,” Lee told a packed atrium in the Petit Institute. “You’re setting a trend for many of institutions around the country.”
ENGAGES (Engaging New Generations at Georgia Tech through Engineering & Science) is a high school science education program that was developed at Georgia Tech, partnering with six minority-serving public high schools in Atlanta (Coretta Scott King Young Women's Leadership Academy, B.E.S.T Academy, KIPP Atlanta Collegiate, Benjamin E. Mays High School, Charles R. Drew Charter High School, and South Atlanta High School).
The program is co-directed by Bob Nerem (founding director of the Petit Institute) and Manu Platt (associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering), and managed by Lakeita Servance, who said Project ENGAGES, has reached more than 100 students. “Each year seems to get better than the one before and I’m so happy to see our students flourish beyond what they imagined,” she said. “We’re excited to celebrate our newest graduates from the Class of 2018 and their acceptance into top universities.”
This year’s group of 17 departing high school seniors have been accepted into 10 different universities, where they’ll pursue a wide range of academic interests:
• Gabriel Brown, Georgia State University (GSU), majoring in public health
• Diamond Clark, University of Georgia (UGA), biology
• Jasmine Coley, New York University, computer engineering
• Nzinga Hammonds-Wyatt, Georgia Tech, computer science
• Zaria Hardnett, Georgia Tech, neuroscience
• D’Angelo Howard, GSU, mechanical engineering
• Amanda Jeter, UGA, mechanical engineering
• Jasmine May, University of Pennsylvania, psychology/pre-med
• Marsha McCray, Depauw University, engineering
• Kaiya Mitchell, Georgia Tech, biomedical engineering
• Ty Price, GSU, engineering
• Tatiyanna Singleton, Vanderbilt University, engineering
• Clinton Smith, Georgia Tech, biomedical engineering
• Natasha Stallings, George Washington University, biomedical engineering/pre-med
• Percie Thompson, Agnes Scott College, international relations
• Sanyu Watson, Georgia Tech, mathematics
• Akeen Williams, Georgia Tech, engineering
Looking at the graduates and their families, Lee thought back to more than 50 years ago, when he was graduating high school in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the first students to participate in federally mandated desegregation. And he thought of the poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, a life path that Lee says he is familiar with.
“You’ve also chosen a road not often taken, and that’s a very important decision,” Lee told his audience, though he was speaking directly to the graduates and their families. “You are smart people, so you probably suspect that the road is less traveled because it is steeper, maybe more slippery, more dangerous. But you’re up to the challenge. You eat pressure and stress for breakfast, and ultimately, you want to make a difference, and for that I want to congratulate and encourage you. The success of this program is critically important for all of us. You’re setting a trend for many institutions around the country.”
Potter’s presentation, almost two weeks earlier, was less poetic than Lee’s but no less inspiring. Raised in New Mexico, she turned an early interest in science into a biotech career, helping to guide the launch of breakthrough, billion-dollar products for corporate giants like Genentech, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Merck and Company.
“What you are doing and studying is incredibly important,” Potter told her audience in the Suddath Room. “You’re working on the cutting edge of science. What you’re doing will impact the people who come after you.”
And she offered encouragement for those students considering a career in industry, whether on the research side or the business side, especially in light of reports that there are more Ph.D. scientists than there are academic career opportunities.
“On the business side, we are desperate for Ph.D. scientists, and black Ph.D. scientists are at a premium, I can assure you,” said Potter, now CEO of Myrtle Potter & Company, the global life science advisory firm she started in 2005.
Throughout her presentation, Potter tried to impress on her audience how immersed she is in not just the life science industry, but in the continuing diversification of the industry.
“I’m passionate about opportunities for people of color, for women,” she said. “The industry is too big, the opportunities are too huge, the needs are too great for me to just hear your stories and not get worked up to the point where I feel a little sweaty on my forehead. I care about patients, the science, the people – that’s what you see coming through.”
Her message came across, according to Servance.
“The students raved about the lecture,” she said. “Myrtle’s talk accomplished exactly what I hoped for. It uplifted our students, especially the young ladies, and made them feel empowered to strive for excellence.”
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It was a video of the president’s recent commencement address at Howard University, but he might as well have been talking directly to the Project ENGAGES students that packed the room, along with their families, mentors, teachers, and other well wishers.
“We cannot sleepwalk through life,” President Obama said. “We cannot be ignorant of history.”
And so, mindfulness as well as high-minded science was on display in the Petit Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology as the Project ENGAGES community came together to recognize the past and honor the present, bidding farewell to 14 departing senior students at an end-of-year celebration on May 16.
The video was Manu Platt’s idea. The co-founder and co-director of Project ENGAGES (with Petit Institute founding director Bob Nerem), Platt was beginning his career as a college professor around the time Obama was beginning his career as leader of the free world.
“This will be our last Project ENGAGES class with President Obama as our president,” Platt told the audience, before sharing the video. “I’ve been thinking about that in a big way, because it’s been an interesting journey.”
ENGAGES (Engaging New Generations at Georgia Tech through Engineering and Science) was developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2012 partnership with several minority-serving public high schools in Atlanta.
It’s a year-round education and work program that brings top-performing high school students into Petit Institute labs, where they are exposed to concepts and ideas and equipped with the skills and knowledge to carry out their own independent research projects. It’s part school, part job.
As Nerem explained in his opening remarks, the program’s first cohort of high school students arrived in 2013 – five rising juniors, and five rising seniors that went off to college in 2014. The program added an engineering track to the biotechnology track, and in May 2015, 16 students graduated.
This year’s group of 14 seniors presented their independent research projects at the end-of-year celebration, and were then recognized with certificates and a new emblem of their success, a special graduation cord, introduced by Lakeita Servance, the educational outreach manager who directs the day-to-day processes of Project ENGAGES and moderated the event.
Each of the seniors has big plans, built on their ENGAGES experience, following their graduation from the participating high schools (B.E.S.T. Academy, Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy, KIPP Atlanta Collegiate, and Benjamin E. Mays High School):
• Taren Carter (CSK), mentored by Alexis Noel in the lab of David Hu, will attend Birmingham-Southern College in the fall.
• Alexus Clark (CSK), mentored by Jessica Falcone in the lab of Ravi Bellamkonda, is staying close to home – she’s attending Georgia Tech.
• Makala Faniel (KIPP), mentored by Diane England in the Heat Transfer, Combustion, and Energy Systems Lab, is going the Ivy League route when she starts attending the University of Pennsylvania this fall.
•Taylor Garlington (Mays), mentored by Jessica Pater in the Georgia Tech Research Institute Information and Communications System Lab, will study at both Spellman College and Georgia Tech.
• Jaylyn Gordon (KIPP), an engineering track student mentored by Sheila Isbell, plans to attend Georgia Tech in the fall.
• Nicole Gullatt (Mays), mentored by Stephen Schwaner in the lab of Ross Ethier, will study at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
• Kendreze Holland (B.E.S.T.), mentored by Andrew Shockey in Platt’s lab, will attend Georgia State University this fall.
• Kristen Kelley (Mays), mentored by Melissa Alvarado-Velez in the Bellamkonda lab, is going to Wesleyan College.
• Dezmanique Martin (KIPP), also mentored by Sheila Isbell at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, will study computer science at Duke University this fall.
• Jada Maxwell (Mays), who worked in the Platt lab under the mentorship of Akia Parks, is choosing to serve in the United States Marine Corps before going to college.
• Asha Scott (KIPP), mentored by Caitlin Sok in the lab of Ed Botchwey, plans to attend Middle Tennessee State.
• Jessie Smith (B.E.S.T.), mentored by Colin Usher in the GTRI Aerospace Transportation and Advanced Systems Laboratory, will attend to Georgia Tech, which means six of this year’s class of graduating ENGAGES scholars will return to familiar territory.
• Qwantayvious Stiggers (B.E.S.T.), who was mentored by Kristen Parratt-Gordon in the lab of Krishnendu Roy, will attend the University of Michigan.
Toward the end of the evening, as part of his closing remarks, Platt played the video of the president’s speech.
“Yes, you’ve worked hard, but you’ve also been lucky,” Obama said.
There was something Platt wanted to add, and it had to do with paying the luck forward, for future generations of ENGAGES scholars and their peers.
“I’ve heard luck defined as what happens when preparation meets opportunity,” Platt said. “It’s important not to forget that we have been lucky. Your parents, your families, your friends and we here at Project ENGAGES – we’ve all helped prepare you. Now it’s time for you to go out and make the most of the opportunities in front of you. Then, in a few years, turn around and make some luck for somebody else.”
CONTACT:
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
ENGAGES stands for Engaging New Generations at Georgia Tech through Engineering and Science. Accordingly, the program raises awareness of engineering, science and technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology for students in economically challenged, minority-serving public schools.
Headquartered at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, ENGAGES gives high school students a chance to work in labs led by some of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s world-class researchers. Stiggers, a senior at B.E.S.T. Academy High School, spends many of his after-school hours in the lab of Krishnendu Roy. It is both a job and a rare education opportunity, and the experience has been invaluable, Stiggers said. But it was a trip far afield that clinched the idea for him that he has a role to play in the world of healthcare.
During fall semester, he was part of a group of seven ENGAGES students who attended the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (AMRCMS) in Seattle.
“What an eye-opener,” Stiggers said. “The conference exposed me to a world of diversity I didn’t really know about. It was great to see and meet so many other African-American people – people who look like me – pursuing the things that I want to pursue, doing the things that I want to do. It was encouraging.”
That was kind of the point of the trip, admitted Manu Platt, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, who co-founded and co-chairs Project ENGAGES with the Petit Institute’s founding director, Bob Nerem.
“I wanted them to go because I remember the first time I attended this conference,” said Platt, a Petit Institute faculty researcher. “It’s amazing when you walk in and there are all of these dark-skinned, brilliant kids, dressed to the nines, professional looking. I wanted our students to see this large group of young scientists that look like them, so they could interact and network.”
That Seattle trip was a highlight for Stiggers in particular (it helped reinforce his dreams of becoming a physician with a yen toward research), and the ENGAGES program in general last semester, capped in December with the annual winter celebration at the Petit Institute. The atrium hummed with the chatter of students, their mentors, faculty, family and representatives from the participating high schools (Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy, KIPP Atlanta Collegiate and Mays High School in addition to B.E.S.T., all of them in the Atlanta Public School system).
They gathered around and among a maze of student research posters. Then everyone packed themselves into the Suddath Room for an enlightening panel discussion among former ENGAGES students who are now in college: Amadou Bah (Stanford), Katrina Burch (Georgia Tech), Jovanay Carter (Dartmouth), and Imani Moon (North Carolina A&T).
The current group of ENGAGES students wanted to know what to expect from the college experience. The panel didn’t sugarcoat its answers.
“I study all of the time. I haven’t been out since homecoming,” Burch said. “I usually go to sleep around 4 a.m., wake up around 9 on a good day, sometimes 8. So yeah, I’m always studying.”
Bah, who went from his Atlanta roots all the way across the country to attend Stanford, is one of Stiggers’ closest friends, “and he didn’t hold anything back,” said Stiggers, who has been accepted at Georgia Tech, but also is considering the University of Michigan and Stanford. “Amadou said the course work was extremely difficult, but you can’t give in to doubt – you’ve got to push through. College is a whole different ballgame, he said. It changes you.”
The same might be said of travel. It changes you. That was certainly the case for five of the seven students who went on the Seattle trip. “It was the first time they stepped foot on a plane,” Platt said.
Once in Seattle, the ensemble mingled with college students and scientists, met Nobel Laureates, heard keynote speeches from some of the most influential researchers and healthcare leaders in the country and saw or heard a mountain of research.
Most of the 4,000 attendees were college students, but Stiggers, who will graduate high school this year, felt like he was exactly where he belonged.
“It was inspiring. They kept drawing me in,” he said. “It felt like I was already in college.”
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Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
Become a Project ENGAGES mentor
CONTACT:
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
The magazine featuring Platt lives up to its name, focusing on issues around the broad and timely topic of human diversity in education, coming in the wake of recent incidents involving police violence against Black men.
In the front-of-the-book editorial, executive editor David Pluviose writes about becoming “aware of the extent to which the fear of Black men had pervaded American society,” and given this, “it is not altogether surprising to me that there seems to be a shoot first, ask questions later mentality among some in law enforcement across the country when it comes to encounters with Black men.”
Pluviose then goes on to write, “I believe that the work of our 2015 Emerging Scholars could help turn the tide of public perception concerning the value of the Black man.”
Spotlighting a few of the scholars in his editorial, Pluviose notes Platt’s appearance: “If he donned some sweats and sneakers, it might be easy to confuse our cover subject, Georgia Tech and Emory University’s Manu Platt, with many other Black men on the street donning dreadlocks and earrings."
Then he adds, "Platt’s cutting-edge computer modeling-enhanced research into new ways or of reducing stroke risk among children with sickle cell disease and better investigating HIV-mediated cardiovascular disease and cancer metastasis is truly world-class.”
Platt says he was pleasantly surprised when he found out he was being considered for the cover (in December, during the photo session). But he deeply appreciates the magazine’s tone, the bigger picture human focus that goes well beyond career highlights.
“They’re writing about what’s happening in America today, what it’s like to be a Black man, how someone like me might look to other people, and I love that,” Platt says. “It’s all about professors with a purpose. That’s something I’ve always thought about. Work like this, the Emerging Scholars program, just reinforces the notion.”
The publication of the magazine was timely for another reason, something closer to home, closer to Georgia Tech. One of the Project ENGAGES students, Katrina Burch, was invited by the White House to be part of a two-person panel (Thursday, January 15) in the nation’s capitol at a conference called, “Front and Center: Bringing Marginalized Girls into STEM and Career and Technical Education.”
The conference brought together federal, state and local agencies, service providers, researchers, the private sector, and youth to discuss policies and programs designed to increase access for low-income girls and girls of color, girls like Katrina Burch.
A senior at Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy, Burch is in her second and final year of ENGAGES, a program that has its share of success stories – all of the first high school graduates who went through the program are now in college, and many are the first generation in their families to do so. That will be the case for Burch, whose inclusion on the panel was the result of fortuitous connectivity leading to communication leading to action.
Basically, it started with a conversation between Georgia Tech Community Relations Director, Chris Burke, and his friend Marcus Bright, who is executive director of the non-profit, Education for a Better America. Bright was organizing a discussion with the White House around the topic of attracting young minority women to STEM education and asked if Burke would participate.
“There were probably four or five universities represented in the conversation, and we each shared what we were doing,” says Burke. “Fortunately, I got to go last. Most of the universities are doing some similar things, so after everybody else talked about what they were doing, it was my turn.”
Burke could have kept the conversation going for hours if he wanted to, because Georgia Tech has implemented a number of programs that build sustained partnerships with nearby communities. For example, the Westside Communities Alliance works to foster neighborhood unity and develop sustainable models that address challenges facing low to moderate income communities that neighbor urban campuses.
He told the White House about Project ENGAGES and one of President Obama’s senior policy advisors, Becky Monroe, was on the line. A few days later she called Burke. He steered her toward Platt, which led to Burch.
“I am so psyched to be part of this,” says Burch, who spoke with Valerie Jarrett, another senior advisor to the president, and chair of the White Council on Women and Girls (one of the conference’s organizing agencies, along with the White House Domestic Policy Council, the Department of Education’s Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education, and the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality).
“Initially, they just wanted my input. They asked me if the direction they were moving in was appropriate, and I was like, ‘why do they care what I think?’ I thought what they were trying to do sounded great,” says Burch, who grew up in Atlanta, one of three kids – the only daughter – raised by a single mom, who also has a young son with developmental disabilities (due to a genetic disorder called di George syndrome).
“They want to hear my life story, basically, the challenges I’ve faced, how I got to where I am now, my younger brother and his challenges, my mother,” adds Burch, who took only the second flight of her life. Her first was about a month ago, when she and her lab mentor, Dr. Kristi Porter, attended the American Society for Cell Biology annual conference, where they presented their research.
Platt, Porter and Katrina’s mother also attended the conference in Washington, D.C. It was her mother’s first time on a plane.
“That’s a cool thing, my mother’s first flight,” says Burch, who has been busily applying for different schools (Tech is her first choice).
A little experience – taking your first flight, for example – can be a very empowering thing. So can working in a university lab, gaining the confidence and the steady mind of a scientist, taking on responsibilities within the framework of a highly skilled research team. That’s basically the ENGAGES experience. It’s empowerment. It’s liberation from the tired, old restrictive norm.
“The White House wanted to know about what we were doing to help keep girls interested in science, so I ran down a history of the program, told them about the importance of the personal touches, as well as having high expectations, all of these ENGAGES stories,” says Platt, whose tireless efforts have helped make he and Burch part of the national discussion on diversity in education.
“I could hear a lot of expressions on the other end of the phone line," he says. "They seemed impressed, and they hadn’t even met Katrina yet. I told them, ‘you have got to meet this girl and hear her story.’”
And now, they have.
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In his old job, Solomon McBride rarely did anything more challenging than stick groceries in a bag. In his current job, he’s performing experiments in a well-equipped lab, researching the negative effects antiretroviral drugs can have on the cardiovascular systems of HIV patients.
So yeah, the 18-year-old McBride likes his current job way more than his last job. Except, it’s not exactly a job. It’s more like an educational opportunity. And soon, he’ll have to give it up, but that’s good thing, because better things await McBride, a second-year Project ENGAGES student who will start attending Brandeis University near Boston, this fall on a Posse Scholarship.
If you’ve spent any time at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Biotechnology and Bioscience, chances are good that you’ve seen McBride or his fellow students in Project ENGAGES, a high school education program created through the NSF Science and Technology Center on the Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems (EBICS, a research center that is supported and resides in the Petit Institute).
Developed last year at the Georgia Institute of Technology in partnership with Coretta Scott King Young Women's Leadership Academy and B.E.S.T Academy, two minority-serving public high schools in the City of Atlanta, the program aims to serve “a community of children who did not see themselves as belonging or fitting in with a place like Georgia Tech,” according to Lakeita Servance, who oversees Project ENGAGES as the EBICS’ (and Petit Institute’s) education outreach manager. “We’re also introducing students to a broader field of science. Studying biology doesn’t mean that you can only be a doctor, so this program demonstrates that you can do a number of different things, that you have choices and options.”
And McBride, who recently graduated from the B.E.S.T. Academy, likes his expanded options. He’d been thinking along the lines of careers in film, or economics, but after more than a year studying and working in Manu Platt’s lab he says, “science is wide open. I always liked science, but doubted myself, so I was hesitant. But now I feel like research is definitely something I want to do, and the experience here has given me a foundation for the college experience. I understand the mindset it takes now.”
During the school year, students involved in Project ENGAGES who are on the biotechnology track (like McBride) commit to working 12 to 15 hours a week in a Georgia Tech bio lab (there is also now an engineering track, developed under the leadership of the Georgia Tech Research Institute). During the summer, it goes up to 40 hours a week. Students are paid $9 an hour for their time – time they otherwise would have spent bagging groceries or flipping burgers, probably. So there is a sense not only of working for a grade, but actually producing results in the lab, helping to make hands on discoveries. That’s what hooked McBride, who also appreciates the commitment of his mentors and lab partners (undergrads, PhD students, post-docs, etc.).
“We get a wage, so it’s a job that we take seriously,” McBride says. “I’m sure it’s not easy to have a bunch of high school students in your labs, but they’ve given us responsibilities, they treat us like adults. There’s a sense of importance to what we’re doing, and you have to get it right. You learn it. And you get the hands on experience, working with the equipment, doing the experiments. You see the cause and effect. You make the connections. It all comes together.”
McBride comes from a family that places a high value on a college education, so his academic pursuits are grounded, to some degree, close to the heart. He has three older sisters who have set an inspirational pace. One graduated from Howard University, another from Swarthmore, and another is going to art school in Chicago. So, McBride is carrying on a bit of the family tradition, and when he gets to Boston, he’ll be a much more confident version of himself. Part of that is the Project ENGAGES experience, but the deeper source comes from his time at the B.E.S.T. Academy.
“I started there in the sixth grade, the first class at the school,” he says. “If you asked me then, I’d have said, ‘get me out of here right now!’ But looking back, it was a great experience, partly due to the challenges a new school faces. You’re a startup, learning how to stand on your feet, and you face many problems, you know, like growing pains. You go through that and you get a sense of resilience that you’re going to need throughout life.”
He showed plenty of resilience through an extensive Posse Scholar recruitment process – about 1,200 students in the Atlanta region applied for the 61 scholarships that were ultimately awarded. The scholarships come from the 25-year-old Posse Foundation, a U.S. non-profit organization that identifies, recruits and trains students with academic and leadership potential.
The scholars are then organized in supportive, often multicultural teams (or, “posses” of 10 students) comprised of students from the same city, and Posse Foundation partner colleges and universities award four-year, full-tuition leadership scholarships. Then, for eight months before beginning their college careers, the Posse Scholars attend weekly pre-collegiate training meetings, getting to know the members of their posse, and generally preparing for the academic, social and personal challenges ahead.
Getting through the door involved three rounds of interviews. Before the first round, McBride asked Bob Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute who co-founded Project ENGAGES with assistant professor Manu Platt last year, to write a letter of recommendation – students are asked to supply this, and typically it comes from one of their high school teachers. The first question McBride got from the first interviewer was, How in the world did get a letter from a Georgia Tech professor? The answer is, Project ENGAGES.
McBride has met with his posse weekly since finding out he won the scholarship in December. They’re all Atlanta kids and all are African-American, which is a first for Posse, which serves (and has offices in) nine U.S. cities, and strives for a diverse collection of scholars. Project ENGAGES also puts a premium on diversity, integrating its group of entirely African-American high school students with the wide-ranging cultural melting pot that is the Petit Institute. So, McBride was a little surprised when he first met his monochromatic posse.
“It was weird at first, but then you get to know your posse and you realize that diversity doesn’t just mean skin color,” McBride ways. “My posse is made up of people from entirely different backgrounds, people with completely different life experiences, whether from an economic or family standpoint or otherwise.”
He expects the lessons of integrative communities to continue at Brandeis, and he is open minded about the educational possibilities, which he believes, like science, are wide open. McBride isn’t sure yet what he’ll major in, but he’s certain it will be related to scientific research. In the short term, however, he knows exactly what he wants to be: the next John Ewing.
Ewing, an undergrad at Vanderbilt University, where he also stars on the cross-country team, has been working in Nerem’s lab the past four summers. So, Ewing’s summertime role has evolved with the infusion of high school students in Petit Institute labs. There were 10 students in the first Project ENGAGES biotech class last year, all of whom returned to 40-hour status this summer, plus 10 new students on the biotech track, who began the summer session with a boot camp, and have only recently moved into labs.
“Boot camp is a lot to get through, but once they get in the lab, they start putting it all together, and that’s my favorite part,” says Ewing, a rising senior at Vanderbilt who grew up in Atlanta and plans to go to medical school. “You see how they react once they are paired with their mentors, you see the change between that first day, when research mentors present their projects, to the last day, when the high school students present their projects. They’ve gone from not really knowing what’s going on to being able to present and own a piece of a research project. That’s a really cool transformation.”
It’s a transformation he’s had a guiding hand in. Ewing helps organize the students, gives talks on cell biology, helps the kids with their research presentations – an all-around utility player with a friendly ear for the high school kids who are really just a few years younger than he is. And as an Atlanta guy who comes home every year and brings something back to the Georgia Tech community, he’s set an example for McBride, who envisions coming back to the Petit Institute to fill a similar kind of mentor’s role.
“John has had a huge impact on the program, and on me,” says McBride. “Not just for the four weeks of boot camp, but through the summer. I’m not sure he realizes it, but the example he sets, his dedication and support, is something we all admire. So yeah, I do want to be the next John Ewing. That would be pretty cool.”