Physics grad students spread the word in city's high schools

Outreach shows teens that science and math can lead to powerful careers

In a Bronx, N.Y., high school where the dropout rate was 60 percent, a guidance counselor declined to give Stephon Alexander an application to an Ivy League university.

"You won't get in," Alexander recalls the counselor saying.

But Alexander (left) proved the counselor wrong. He was accepted to Cornell on a four-year scholarship, and will graduate May 29 from Brown with a doctorate in physics. He spreads a different message to high school students: Science is cool, and they can do it.

"Here's another alternative than basketball and football that pays. It's cool. It's fun," he tells students at Mount Pleasant High School in Providence.

Alexander is among six graduate students in the physics department who are showing teen-agers that high school science and math can lead them into powerful careers. The six graduate students reach out to Providence high school students as part of $15,000 annual fellowships from the U.S. Department of Education's program called Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need. Brown receives $380,000 over three years ending next academic year for the fellowships. In addition, the fellows receive another $1,600 from a private donor, Warren Galkin '51.

Graduate student David Dooling (left) says the high school students benefit from one hour of personal attention. He and two other graduate students - Wessyl Kelly and Damien Easson - helped teen-agers with math problems at nearby Hope High School on Wednesday afternoons.

"With the advent of the calculator and computer, scientific theory or quantitative thinking - that's gone completely out of the window. They need more one-on-one personal contact where you teach this quantitative subject matter," said Dooling, who plans to teach after doing postdoctoral research.

"They show perfectly good aptitude but they have no confidence in it," said Kelly (left), who also tutored a girl on Brown's campus. "I tell her, 'No, you can do it, you just have to focus on it.'"

She said most students lack confidence because they come from homes that lack an emphasis on academics. For some, English is a second language.

Alexander says he likes to show students that he's no different from them, and that they can develop a driving interest in science or math as he did.

"These kids understand that I'm coming from the same type of backgrounds. Like them, both my parents are immigrants, from the Caribbean. Like them I've had my struggles," Alexander said.

Last year, Dooling, Kelly and Easson (left) coached a Science Olympiad team at Classical High School to the 1999 state competition. Alexander co-taught a math class at Central High School where grades improved and "they were actually catching some fire," said Robert Brandenberger, the physics professor who coordinates the fellowships along with chairman David Cutts and other faculty members.

In a seminar room in the Barus and Holley Building, the graduate students recently gathered with their professors and Galkin to discuss the impact of their outreach to schools.

"Education in math and science at the high school level in the United States is not very good," Brandenberger said. "Anything we can do at that level will be an improvement."

This year, Alexander co-taught a chemistry class with Mount Pleasant teacher Theodore Johnson, a Brown alum who received graduate degrees in pathobiology and education in 1998.

Johnson's concern is that there is little to continue to build interest in science outside the classroom. He says what's needed is paid, credit-earning internships where high school students would work alongside graduate students in a lab. The pay wouldn't have to be much, he says - just enough to prevent teen-agers from working elsewhere.

"My brightest students are not doing as well as they can be doing. They are working until 11 or midnight at McDonald's," Johnson said. "They are students who could lead in our community."