Low income and underrepresented high school students from the Los Angeles County area participated in a six-week summer academy at Cal State Long Beach that closed with oral presentations and an awards banquet last Saturday.
The Upward Bound Math Science (UBMS) program, in its second year at CSULB, attracted students from Long Beach, Los Angeles, Compton and Norwalk-La Mirada school districts.
For six weeks, 19 students lived in the CSULB dorms and attended specially designed classes in math, electrical engineering, computer programming, chemistry and literature.
This year’s overarching theme was biomedical engineering. Last year’s theme was marine biology.
In addition to coursework, the students also went on field trips to University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, University of California, San Diego, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.
“I want to be an engineer so this program was great for me” said Eleuterio Lucca, an incoming junior at Centennial High School. “The best part of it was the learning experience and having to wake up by ourselves and getting ready to go to class.”
Students in the intensive program attended classes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. five days a week followed by evening study sessions.
They were not allowed to have cell phones or MP3 players during the six weeks.
“Our residential advisers had phones and so at night they could call using [the RAs’] phones to check in with their parents,” said Kagba Suaray, director of UBMS.
Laptops were restricted until the last week for final projects and Facebook was explicitly prohibited.
“We weren’t allowed any technology until the end,” said Emily Mundo, an incoming junior at Centennial High School. “It took a bit of adjusting to but in the end we all did it.”
Suaray said the program offers tutoring to its students year-round to help them continue to develop academically.
Upward Bound is one of the original federally funded TRIO programs created in the ’60s to help low-income and first generation underrepresented students learn math and science.
The name TRIO is not an acronym, but rather refers to the three original programs, including Student Support Services and Talent Search.
According to the U.S. Department of Education website, Upward Bound is a Lyndon B. Johnson era program that emerged out of the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act as part of the War on Poverty.
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