San Jose Mercury News. Friday, August 12, 1994

ENVIRONMENTAL ADVANTAGES:
Stanford Program for Gifted Teens Gives Disadvantaged a Fresh Lease on the Future

By: Melinda Sacks

Mercury News Staff Writer

AT HOME in Sacramento, Tamara Reygers, 16, spends a lot of time caring for her disabled mother and her elderly grandmother. But for this summer, Tamara has been able to indulge her dream of becoming a thoracic surgeon.

Chris Wilczewski, 15, had his front teeth knocked out years ago but hasn't had them fixed yet because his mother, who is on welfare, and his father, a janitor, never knew what to do. Now he's not only getting his teeth fixed, thanks to the help of the summer program he's in, but he's also decided he wants to study medicine after spending time dissecting cadavers.

Lilia Aguilar, 15, is one of seven children of parents who are farm laborers. "I never thought I'd actually get to talk to someone from Stanford or Harvard," she says, wide-eyed. But here she sits, in the lounge of a Stanford University residence where she and her peers have lived for five weeks, recounting what she says is the experience of her life.

For 20 teens chosen from a field of more than 200, the past five weeks may prove to be life-altering. Seven days a week, from as early as 6 a.m. to as late as midnight, participants in Stanford's Youth Environmental Science Program have rubbed elbows with Nobel laureates and MacArthur fellows. They have worked in emergency rooms and laboratories, studied poetry and philosophy, and researched and given oral reports on environmental topics that would be considered sophisticated even at college level. The students, who range in age from 15 to 18 and come from all over Northern California, are all considered exceptionally gifted. They are all from low-income, disadvantaged families. They are predominantly minorities. And many of them will be the first in their families ever to go to college.

''I'd like them to be able to accomplish their dreams," says Michael McCullough, 28, who co-founded the program with Ana Rowena Mallari, a senior in Stanford's human biology program and an associate at the Environmental Defense Fund. In its first year, the program has a $66,000 budget provided by the Irvine Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, the Peninsula Community Foundation and several others. Stanford University Law School acts as the fiscal agent, while staff from the department of human biology serve as academic advisers.

''They (the students) all came here with high aspirations, but they didn't know the path to get there," McCullough says of the students. "The idea is to take kids with a strong attitude to succeed against the odds in high school and make sure they end up in a place in society and the community that is best for them."

To do that, McCullough and Mallari have modeled the program after the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program that McCullough helped found in 1987. Seven years later, 100 percent of that program's participants have gone on to four-year colleges, including Yale, Harvard and Stanford.

''The new environmental theme enables us to do outreach on issues that pertain to all people," explains McCullough, "whereas in the old program I could only take kids interested in being physicians. Almost anyone is interested in the environment."

In addition to introducing this year's participants to environmental issues and related careers, the new program emphasizes college preparatory skills such as taking the SAT, public speaking and note taking. There are assignments of college entrance essays and mock vocabulary exams. It is all aimed at teaching skills necessary for entering college and making the process less intimidating. The students live in a vacant campus fraternity house and are supervised by a staff of 11.

''Being in a college setting and knowing they can succeed there is a big part of it," says Mallari. "By the time they leave here, it's not some big mysterious, ominous setting. It's a place they want to return to."

''It has opened doors to me," says Lourdes Flores, a 17-year-old from Hollister whose parents are migrant farm workers. "When I came, I was thinking maybe I would apply to community college when I finish high school. Now I see that I could apply to a school like Stanford."

On a sunny July afternoon when most teens would be happy heading for the beach, this Stanford group is decked out in slacks and dresses for an afternoon of science presentations in a Stanford law school lecture hall. Many of them were up until midnight, putting finishing touches on reports ranging from environmental pollution in the home to "Climate and life: change and diversity."

One boy is getting help with his tie from a classmate. Others are scanning notes for the last time.

Ariel da Luz, 16, stands behind the lectern facing her audience. Her report, she tells them with genuine enthusiasm, is on sludge. Da Luz would appear to be an unlikely expert on the pollution and storage problems created by human fecal matter. But she has clearly mastered her subject and makes an eloquent presentation complete with overhead transparencies she has created.

''So," she says with a grin after her 15-minute talk, "that's about it."

The questions that follow are intelligent and polite. Finally there is applause and da Luz takes her seat to be hugged by the girl sitting next to her.

The relationships that form are in many ways as important as the boost to self-esteem and the academic rigors. In almost every case, the students are away from home for the first time, and they learn to live and work together in a forced intimacy that makes them fast friends. But it doesn't happen by chance. Early in the program, everyone participates in a ropes course, in which the final exercise involves creating a human ladder to enable each person to scale a 12-foot wall. There is nothing like physical adversity to foster trust and communication, McCullough says.

''It's hard to believe you'd be sad about leaving people who were strangers just five weeks ago," says Lourdes Flores. "But we are. There are people from Korea, Afghanistan, the Caribbean. Before I met all these people I went to a school with just Caucasians and Mexican-Americans. It was like I didn't know anybody else."

Tamara Reygers sits cross-legged on the floor surrounded by her new friends. "We're a multicultural family," she concludes.

Establishing a summer program for disadvantaged kids has been a longtime goal of Stanford graduate McCullough, who left the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program he founded in 1987 to study as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford for two years. He returned to enter medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where he is a full-time student. The school is allowing McCullough to take eight extra months to complete medical school so he can continue work on the new environmental program.

''I had an itch to do something meaningful and I knew I could do it," he says, when asked why he is working 20-hour days in addition to studying medicine. "I've had students (graduates from the medical program he started) tell me they wouldn't have ended up in medical school without it or without me," McCullough says. "I had one kid tell me he stayed out of a gang because of the program. That's the reward."

But McCullough's personal history is another factor that drives him, he acknowledges. Born with a condition known as recessive hydrocephalus, McCullough spent the first 10 years of his life with such severe speech difficulties that his twin brother had to translate for him. He suffered from debilitating migraine headaches, coordination problems and social ostracism.

''Sometimes the kids would wait to ridicule me until they thought I couldn't hear them," he wrote in his Rhodes scholarship essay. "Often they wouldn't."

After brain surgery and years of fighting his physical limitations, McCullough drastically improved his fluency, although he still stutters. He forced himself to do public speaking, then teaching and even stand-up comedy, always pushing harder. While he blushes at the suggestion that he is brilliant, he was teaching molecular biology to Stanford graduate students while he was still an undergraduate political science major (he later took on a double major in human biology). McCullough graduated from Stanford Phi Beta Kappa.

''I know what it's like to be an outcast," he says. "Of course my background makes it easier for me to identify with these kids."

At 28, McCullough walks a fine line between being a peer and an authority figure and mentor to his students. He is at ease barefoot and in jeans, sharing family-style dinners in the fraternity house where they all live. But he can don a double-breasted suit and present an almost formidable figure during intense academic sessions.

''Michael is able to say, 'Here I am and I am a friend, I'm approachable,' " observes Virgil Zanders, a financial analyst and former Stanford classmate of McCullough's who taught public speaking to this summer's students. "But at the same time there is a certain level of expectation. It is amazing to see them look at him as a brother and a friend, but they also respect him like a father."

Like all of those who participated in the program this year, Zanders accepted McCullough's invitation because he thought the program would make a difference, and because of McCullough's track record.

''It warms your heart," he says, "to see young people with that background be so intense and dedicated to doing something to benefit their future."

McCullough's future includes at least another few years co-directing the environmental program and fund raising, he says, before he goes on to either psychiatry, pediatric emergency medicine or maybe wilderness medicine. He wants to stay in the Bay Area, he adds, so that he can stay involved. For now, he is determined to find sponsors for future students. Although the program is free to participants, it costs about $3,000 per student and foundation funding is temporary.

Houston Ngo, a 17-year-old from Oakland, believes -- as do many of the students-- that this summer has changed his life.

''I've found something deeper in myself," he says, taking a break from a computer session during his last week. "I've learned a lot about myself. My neighbors have probably been home selling drugs this summer. But I think I'll feel different when I go home. I've always wanted to be a physician. Now I know it is really possible."

IFYOU'RE INTERESTED

Stanford Youth Environmental Science Program, PO Box 20054 Stanford CA 94309; (650) 854-5220