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Tyrone Spady satisfied his childhood curiosity about nature — kindled by the family aquarium — by playing in creeks, catching fish and watching wildlife programs on television. Today, he's a PhD biologist and a fellow at the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Research Institute.
Interest in nature leads many young people to enter college as science majors. Spady, now 30, distinguished himself from the crowd by staying the course with help from the Meyerhoff Scholarship Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
Ninety percent of Meyerhoff participants graduate with advanced degrees in the sciences — a dramatic improvement over the 40 to 60 percent of science and engineering majors nationwide who switch to other fields before graduating.
According to Meyerhoff Director LaMont Toliver, the program's effectiveness stems from "high expectations from the top down" and "the totality of everybody's involvement in the success of these students — from the president to the provost to the faculty and staff."
Says UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski III, himself a PhD mathematician: "We have to get away from the notion that first-year science courses are weed-out courses and begin thinking about ways of assuring that more students who begin in science continue in science."
For Meyerhoff students, worrying about failure is "not even a possibility," says Spady, an African-American. "Of course you're going to finish" your undergraduate work. "Of course you're going to get a PhD."
The program sprang from conversations between Hrabowski and Baltimore-area philanthropists Robert and Jane Meyerhoff. Hrabowski, an African-American, and the Meyerhoffs were concerned about the small number of minorities in the sciences. Financed by a $500,000 grant from the Meyerhoffs, the program enrolled its first cohort — 19 undergraduate African-American young men — in 1989.
Women entered the program the next year. In 1996, the program was opened to students of all races, as long as they are "committed to increasing the representation of minorities in science and engineering." (Toliver expects that white students' experiences in the program will make them supportive of minorities in the sciences when they become educators or run labs.) Graduate fellowships were added in 1997. The program enrolled a total of 267 students for the 2007-08 academic year.
Freshmen begin with a six-week summer session designed to be a high-school-to-college bridge. "It creates community, and it addresses the knowledge gap that students have," Toliver explains. "It also humbles them to learn that what they did at high school won't cut it in higher education."
Freshmen also begin working with faculty in laboratories. On-campus lab work and summer internships continue throughout their enrollment. A first-year chemistry course emphasizes entrepreneurship and is taught by a faculty member who runs a biotech company in the university's research park.
Each student is paired with a mentor, some of whom work off campus. Advisers address such subjects as business etiquette, how to interview for a job, how to obtain summer internships and how to prepare applications for graduate school.
Biologist Tyrone Spady participated in the Meyerhoff Scholarship Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. (University of Maryland Baltimore County)
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"To produce scientists, universities need to think about the personal side — questions of emotional development and social integration into the campus — as well as the scientific side," Hrabowski says.
That's why the students live in the same dormitory while freshmen and spend a great deal of time working and playing together. "They see each other as brothers and sisters," Toliver says.
Those relationships — and contact with the university — continue after graduation. And students say the community is one of the program's most important aspects. Spady says the Meyerhoff community not only helped him get through four years at UMBC but also prepared him to succeed later in settings where minorities were almost non-existent.
For instance, there were no minorities in his program at the University of New Hampshire, where he earned his PhD, and there were only about five minority graduate students on campus, Spady says. Other minority graduate students he knows who dropped out "often cited the feeling of isolation."
Keeping in touch with fellow Meyerhoff graduates was "a really important part of making it through the PhD process — having students to talk with who were in a similar place as me," he says.
Kamili Jackson, now a 33-year-old PhD engineer, says she would have been "a little bit lost" at UMBC without the Meyerhoff community. Meyerhoff contacts also helped her adjust to her job in the Hubble Space Telescope program, she adds.
"This is my first job," she explains, "and at the beginning it was kind of tough — definitely different from academia." Meyerhoff Director Toliver mentored her during that early employment period. "In that transition, LaMont really helped out a lot."
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