EUGENE Ore. – On a summer afternoon in Eugene on Sunday, four dozen teenagers were cooped up in a windowless classroom somewhere in the bowels of the University of Oregon’s Knight Library, listening to a lecture on be still my beating heart! using libraries.
And yet they couldn’t have been happier.
“This is my second year here,” said Cesar Landrum, a 15-year-old sophomore-to-be at Sheldon High School. “I think it’s fun to come do this, live in the dorms, study together. Last year we learned about financial planning for college.”
He’d better plan. He wants to go to The Juilliard School in New York City and study acting.
And, no, this is not an assembly of teenage geeks.
Instead, Sunday marked the first day of 2011’s Oregon Young Scholars Program, a weeklong residential program for “historically underrepresented” high-school-age students from a targeted group of schools in the Portland and Eugene areas. The program was created six years ago by Carla Gary, who is assistant vice president for institutional equity and diversity at the University of Oregon and a passionate advocate for drawing talented students of color into the university.
The idea, Gary said, is to take high school students who might not come from a college-oriented background children of first-generation immigrants, say, or children of parents who never attended college and give them the skills and comfort level to help them find and navigate a good university education. And that means starting young.
