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What links the NGVF scholars to the right is more than the sum of their accomplishments. Like many students, all of them foster aspirations for success and, even more exciting, all have demonstrated the potential to achieve their success. That each overcomes an obstacle to do so, however, casts a special light on the potential they’ve shown.
The hardest fact for Philip’s mother was to know that her continued five-year struggle with cancer was curbing her son’s opportunity to ever be a lawyer or a veterinarian. What she wanted was for Philip to have “a few weeks to devote some time to his dreams, and not be smack in the middle of our family worries.”Dorian’s parents wanted the same for their son who—despite his overwhelming abilities—faced similar difficulties, especially since Dorian’s father, though college-educated in Poland, now finds employment as a handyman, and is often away from the family working overtime just to meet the monthly bills. And Felicia-Ann’s mother, a single parent with four younger children in their public housing unit, was afraid her daughter would simply “slip through the cracks.”
The Next Generation Venture Fund is specifically designed to ensure extremely bright, students like Philip, Dorian, and Felicia-Ann, don’t slip through the cracks. As NGVF scholars, they have made investments in themselves. They continue to meet the scholastic requirements of the award through its duration—a four year commitment to academic excellence.
The benefits? Starting high school, scholars have the resources of four preeminent gifted education programs at their disposal—The Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (CTY), the Duke University Talent Identification Program (Duke TIP), the Northwestern University Center for Talent Development (CTD), and the University of Denver Rocky Mountain Talent Search (RMTS).
They gain the backing of leading foundations and corporations dedicated to promoting their academic and career growth.
And scholars receive the one-on-one academic advisement that can help them see beyond their current circumstances; the mentoring that can mean the difference between knowing their potential, and realizing it.
Scholar Profiles
Philip
He isn’t sure whether he wants to be a veterinarian or an attorney, so Philip says his fail-safe career might be as an animal rights advocate. “And I hope the attorney part comes from Harvard Law School,” he adds.At 14, Philip is on his way. He is a foreign languages student at his Staten Island, New York high school and still corresponds with his Civil War History instructor from his NGVF summer program, gleaning new lessons from one of our nation’s major conflicts; what he learns he then applies as a volunteer peer mediator when disputes among students arise.
“That gives me a little taste at what it’s like being a lawyer,” he says, and because of this, he may take another history course through NGVF next summer. “Or I might try some animal biology,” he adds, “just to keep things even.”
Dorian
Ask Dorian where he’ll be in a decade. Without hesitation he’ll reply with a lyrical Polish accent and in impeccable English, “ten years from now I see myself developing new pharmaceuticals based on a better understanding of protein mechanics . . . That’s my prediction.”His wish, not yet a prediction, is to attend Princeton University. By volunteering most of his evenings in his high school’s biology lab, Dorian communicates a clear vision of where he wants to go. He’s also found that by stretching his English language skills in the demanding NGVF writing course he took last summer, he’s been able to clarify his vision for others. And the NGVF genetics class he plans to take next is, in many ways, similar.
It’s “another kind of language,” Dorian chuckles, because “those proteins I mentioned speak.” He doesn’t have to wait much longer to hear what they say; it won’t be long before more people hear what Dorian has to say, either.
Felicia-Ann
She may excel at mathematics, cruising through the Algebra I and Algebra II NGVF summer courses, but justice and law are the subjects of 15-year-old Felicia-Ann’s future.“Good people can find themselves in bad situations, and the less fortunate they are, the harder it is for them to make things better without help,” Felicia-Ann says. “And I want to be that kind of help.”
She puts these sentiments into practice on her weekends, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, and while she’s looking forward to the up-close focus of her next NGVF course in Geology, she knows that ultimately she has her sights set on Harvard or Yale Law School. “That’s a long way off,” Felicia-Ann adds, “but that’s what planning is.”
Tre
Soft-spoken and exceedingly polite, Tre’s respectful use of "sir" in his conversation belies the humble environment surrounding him. He lives alone with his mother, Katie, on her $15,000 salary as a part-time crane operator at a local lumber company. She was laid off from her other full-time job last year, "and jobs are not so easy to come by," in their small town of 2,000 mostly low-income residents, says Katie. She noticed her son’s curiosity for numbers when he was very young, Tre explains. "And she taught me how to count when I was still a baby.”Tre’s facility with mathematics and numbers never stopped. He devoured statistics of his favorite sport, baseball, from the newspapers. As an 8th grader he ranked 8th in the statewide mathematics competition, and his high scores on the PSAT earned him a spot on the Junior Scholar Club. He breezed through Algebra I and Geometry at NGVF’s 2003 and 2004 sessions, and this summer will take on Algebra II. But notes mother Katie, "He works very hard, takes the time he needs, always concentrates."
"I would like to be an engineer someday, an aerospace engineer would be the best, so my mathematics has a long way to go," he says. In another sense, Tre is already negotiating heights. Now a high hurdler on the varsity track team, he’s put his love of baseball on hold. "I do pretty well in the hurdles, I think I’m sticking with that."For articulate students like Andrew, pruning away one passion for learning allows him to make room for a new one. "I don’t see this as a negative outlook on education or anything," he says, "but a way of someday putting together all the things you like without the ones you don’t."
How do the NGVF summer courses fit into such a rubric? Andrew once thought he wanted to be an architect as he pored through home magazines and design plans. As much as he enjoyed and devoured his first NGVF experience two summers ago with an architecture course, as a career, "architect" fell by the way. Last summer his Introduction to Medical Science course shifted his interests yet again.
"I think law, especially criminal law, is more in line with my goals now," he says. "In a way it's a combination of the two summer courses; like architecture, you build a case logically, you design it from what you have. And like being a doctor, you’re there to help people."
Andrew shares a small apartment with his mother and grandmother on the outskirts of town and attends a small, private religious school with 700 students from kindergarten through high school. He runs the 100 on the school track team, is a teacher’s aide for high school science, and will soon begin a volunteer position at a Ronald McDonald House. His mother is the sole provider for the family from her clerical job at a nearby factory.
She kids him that since he began taking apart and reassembling computers from parts he bought on E-Bay when he was 13, MIT was the college for him. Andrew is quick to correct the prediction in his polite and demure way. "I am leaning more to Harvard and its law school."Janine
She describes herself as a shot-putter with a math gene and strong shoulders. Indeed Janine has a knack for the numbers as her scores on math exams and tape measure shot-put tosses on the varsity track team both reveal.
"I might get the math from my dad, who’s an elementary school teacher," she says. "And my sister teaches a course in mathematics . . . too, so it runs in the family, I guess." Janine’s mother is a residential counselor for special needs adolescents.
Her favorite subject in high school is chemistry, however, and she jokes that living in her small apartment with both parents, a grandmother and sister—all of whom immigrated from Guyana in the mid-1980s—is a constant experiment in human chemistry. Other family members from Guyana are frequent visitors, so the human laboratory is never quite constant.
Unlike many of the Next Generation Venture Fund young scholars, Janine does not have a specific career in sharp focus or a particular university in her sights. She does, however, want to pursue the sciences, especially chemistry and animal behavior, a taste of which she had last summer with an NGVF course in Animal Science. Janine is already gearing up to take fast-paced geometry this summer through NGVF.
"Id love to get a masters degree in chemistry someday at one university, and a second degree from another, maybe in another country," she says.Ariella speaks as comfortably about the nuances of an English horn and the oboe duet in a Berlioz symphony as she does the rigor of sifting through a paleontoglogical dig.
She is a young woman intent upon following the work ethic of her father, whose family lost everything in the communist takeover in Romania in the 1950s. "When he was about my age, one day his own father owned a button factory," she says. "The next day my grandfather was in prison, and the family had nothing, no money, no work, no savings, all taken away."
As her father’s path later took him to Israel, Canada and eventually to the United States, so, too, has Ariella’s academic and musical path already followed a wide map. She plays the piano and will soon join her high school orchestra as an oboist. Although she admits her favorite subjects are mathematics and the sciences, Ariella is a voracious reader, and on her own time takes private language lessons with a native French-speaking family. She’ll soon begin a volunteer job at a nearby animal shelter.
She sees the paleobiology course she took last year through NGVF as a building block to her career, and she hopes to devote next summer to mathematics. "For a while I thought it was veterinary medicine I would pursue, but I’m sure now I want to be a physician, either in pediatrics or psychiatry."