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What a Difference a Year Makes

One year ago, a group of high school students sat at computers in the Gutman Library checking their e-mail, wondering what they were doing on a Harvard campus. Today, those same students find themselves sitting more poised and confident, and able to discuss the difference in annual earnings between a college graduate and a high school graduate. Some even plan to apply to Harvard this fall.

Undoubtedly, HGSE alum Vu Quang’s nonprofit program College Preview has impacted the lives and futures of these “at-risk” high school students.

“This turned my life around,” says Michael Ricketts, Malden High School senior. “I want to go and get an education. I definitely want to go to college.”

Each of the 10 handpicked students involved in College Preview can tell you how this program changed their life, how they are now college bound, how they got on the honor roll for the first time this year, and how dreams can be realities.

College Preview — born from Quang’s own personal experience as an at-risk adolescent — exposes students to a world they otherwise would never know with Harvard as a backdrop. A multi-phase approach, the program began last summer with students spending a week on the HGSE campus. In phase two, the same students returned to Harvard in the fall on Saturdays to experience more college life such as football games and guest speakers. The students are now entering phase three: internships and college applications.

“He [Vu] understands where we come from,” says Rodney Borgella, Malden High School senior. “He wants kids like us to go somewhere.”

Quang, Ed.M.’02, and Jenny Muscia, Ed.M.’02, College Preview’s director of teaching and learning and an officer on the board of directors, have dedicated the year to opening the eyes of the students to the possibilities of college. During this year’s program, the students learned the “ins and outs” of the college process. They also attended special sessions with HGSE professors including Richard Elmore, Howard Gardner, and Dean Kathy McCartney, and interacted with Ed School students on campus.

“[Going through the program] planted the seed [for these students] that status quo is not good enough and there is something better,” Quang says. “It is tangible… they can see it, touch it, come here and feel it.”

Last year, when Quang asked several Greater Boston school principals whether they’d like to participate in his program, Malden High School Principal Dana Brown was the only one to say yes.

“We’re in a position at Malden High School where we need as much help and support as we can get to reach all of our students,” Brown says. “We don’t claim to be able to reach every student here, so when someone like Vu comes along and offers resources and support with the backdrop of Harvard — you’d be crazy to say no to that.”

Brown and his staff members nominated students for College Preview who, though at the borderline of passing and failing, clearly had potential. The students were then interviewed by Quang and 10 were selected for the program.

The decision to participate in College Preview has already paid off for Brown and Malden High as many school educators have noted the difference in the students this year. “It’s because they’ve developed a relationship with an adult, gone to programs at Harvard — lecture series, football games — and had some great experiences that some are starting to [see] themselves in the position that maybe [college] can be [for] me,” Brown says. “The more kids can reach like that, the better school we’ll be. Vu took a great risk by doing this and we took a leap of faith to say, ‘Go ahead and let’s see what happens.’”

Quang and Muscia, who were uncertain how the first year of the program would go or what the results would be, are equally moved by the results.

“What I see in my eyes are miracles,” Muscia says. “I can’t believe 10 kids still come every Saturday.” And, even better, those 10 students proposed that they come an hour earlier each Saturday in order to have more time, she says.

What began as a trial year and an experiment to get some at-risk students interested in higher education has turned into a group of students who bear an “eagerness to succeed,” Quang says. “I wanted to expose them to a different lifestyle that gives them a blueprint for life…to never settle.”

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