Summer ​“Scholar”
Gets Taste Of Ivy

“This is for practice purposes,” Brandon Ogbunu told his class of 17 Career High seniors as he handed out blocks of gel and bottles of dye. ​“When we’re loading actual DNA, you have to be really careful.”

Responding to a student’s question about the colors of the dye, he added, ​“No, I do not have fluorescent pink.”

Andrea Hernandez, 16, along with lab partner Keany Rodriguez, began injecting samples of dye into the gel. Later in the class, she would do the same with samples of bacterial DNA.

The class was performing an experiment to divide DNA into its constituent molecules in a process known as gel electrophoresis and will use the results to conduct DNA analysis.

They were doing it at Yale, living the life of Yale students, from the work in the labs to sleeping int he dorms and eating meals in the dining halls.

Andrea and her classmates are taking part in the Yale SCHOLAR program, in which the Ivy university opens its doors to science-oriented high-school students who usually go to class down the street.

The INndependent followed Andrea around for a day to get a taste of how summers spent on campus are giving New Haven students like her a true taste of a collegiate future.

SCHOLAR (Science Collaborative Hands-On Learning and Research) gives 60 Career students the opportunity to study science for three weeks in an intensive environment while living on the Yale campu, all for free. Each grade level — rising sophomores, juniors and seniors — takes a different science course.

The senior science class, held in the Environmental Science Center at Yale, deals with environmental science and biotechnology, a subject Hernandez had never taken before. She said she is finding the subject matter fascinating.

“I’ve learned that there are many bacteria that we don’t recognize, but they’re everywhere,” Hernandez said. ​“It’s fun to get to know our environment.”

This is the last of three busy weeks for Hernandez. She and her fellow seniors are at Yale five days a week. (They spend weekends at home.) They take morning and afternoon classes as well as attend speaker sessions. They live in university housing at Jonathan Edwards College along with Yale students who act as residential advisers.

“It’s pretty interesting to have them around to ask about the college experience,” Hernandez said of the RAs. ​“And the program itself gives us experience.”

Ogbunu described Hernandez as an excellent student; the fact that she was chosen for SCHOLAR speaks to her ability. SCHOLAR students have to apply, and getting in can be tough — applicants have to write three essays. Most seniors, including Hernandez, have been in SCHOLAR all three years of eligibility.

Ogbunu and his students were conducting serious work, but their classroom manner was almost playful, with lots of joking around. At one point, as students prepared to elect a representative to speak for them at graduation, Ogbunu said that ​“you guys do better than the Senate.”

As she walked with her friends to lunch at the Davenport College dining hall, Hernandez said she had gotten the opportunity to attend SCHOLAR due to her high grades and intention to follow a science track at Career. ​“Why not get a head start on college?” she figured.

Lunch for Hernandez on Monday was a cheeseburger with french fries and a salad. During her meal Hernandez talked about her plans for the future. Though she said she may look at other colleges, she is planning to apply to and attend the University of Connecticut in order to take advantage of New Haven Promise, which will finance most of her education if she attends a Connecticut public university.

Hernandez said she signed up for Promise as soon as it was announced last year.

“My mom works and everything, but the whole thing is just too much,” Hernandez said.

She said she is looking forward to being the first member of her family to attend college and to being a role model for her younger sister. Her sister is currently in Ecuador. ​“I just can’t wait for her to come back,” Hernandez said.

After lunch, Hernandez joined the entire student body of SCHOLAR in the theater at Jonathan Edwards College for an hour of TED talks. TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a set of conferences designed to promote ​“ideas worth spreading.” SCHOLAR students are generally shown science-related talks daily. Asked about previous talks, Hernandez recalled one about developments in artificial limbs, and another demonstrating the use of Nintendo’s Wii controller for non-Wii computer programs.

Monday differed from the usual pattern in that the students were given the opportunity to pick which talks they wanted to watch. Among the highlights were demonstrations of a robot that flies like a bird, a robotic stand-up comedian and a cellphone that may one day learn how to love.

Seniors had free time after the TED session, from 2 to 3:30, and were allowed to go anywhere they chose. Since a light rain was falling, Hernandez sat with a friend in a covered area of the Jonathan Edwards courtyard and talked about her experience with SCHOLAR.

“I really like the program, but I want to go home and sleep for 10 hours,” Hernandez said. Her busy schedule and communal life mean that she gets less sleep than she would like.

She said that her experience made her look forward to college and communal living, though she isn’t sure whether she’ll live in a dormitory throughout her time in school. (She may be able to stay with an aunt in Storrs.)

Soon it was time to walk to Cooperative Arts High School, site of the seniors’ afternoon class, a college essay workshop. Tim Grady, a creative writing instructor at Coop, once worked at the Kaplan education company.

Grady said that the students’ progress has varied, but that they had all developed a ​“workable, good, grammatically correct college essay they can send in and be proud of.”

“I think it’s changing the way they look at themselves as learners and prospective college students,” Grady said.

The class was working with prompts from the Common Application because they are used frequently and form a good starting point, Grady said. (UConn is one of 456 schools that use the Common Application.)

Grady spend around 15 minutes reviewing some basic grammar and style points (when to use a semicolon, for example). He spent the remainder of the class in individual conferences with students. Hernandez didn’t have a conference scheduled; she spent the time working on the third draft of her college essay, due later that weekend.

The essay, which contains dreamlike elements, deals with the role of soccer in Hernandez’s life and her evolving relationship with the game. While she was understandably reluctant to share her unfinished work with a reporter, she did offer one line she felt was representative of her writing.

“While I was running I realized that Soccer will never be just a simple sport to me but a connection to my father because to me Soccer is not just a game but a joy that I see on his face every time I play,” Hernandez wrote.

Hernandez has played soccer on various teams since childhood, she explained, and the game has taught her the value of ​“leadership and teamwork.” She currently plays in Virgen del Cisne, a soccer tournament for New Haven’s Ecuadorian community, the only teenager on a team of adults.

Later, eating a light dinner of corn flakes at Davenport, Hernandez outlined the rest of her schedule. After dinner students would hear a speaker — they had not been told who. (Hernandez said her favorite speaker so far was Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos, who provided fascinating details about experiments showing the intelligence of monkeys.) This would be followed by three hours used for homework and for practice for the all-important SCHOLAR talent show on Wednesday. Hernandez said her group was planning to perform a ​“humorous” skit parodying an episode of ​“SpongeBob SquarePants”; she would play SpongeBob’s mean duplicate, DoodleBob.

Overall, Hernandez said, SCHOLAR is a ​“great opportunity as well as a great experience” that provides a lot of help for college as well as high school. She noted that sophomores and juniors take classes which summarize the science subjects they take the following year at Career.

Hernandez plans to pursue a pre-med track in college with hopes of becoming a pediatrician, an ambition she developed after volunteering at Yale-New Haven Hospital. And Hernandez believes that SCHOLAR has helped her reach that goal. In 13 years of SCHOLAR, every participant has gone to college. She said she’s confident she will follow them.