Millennium Scholars: STEM firmly rooted
Our first cohort of Millennium Scholars graduated this past spring, an amazing group that has set the bar high for all future cohorts, with an average 3.7 GPA and impressive research resumes listing highly competitive internships and summer research experiences at institutions including Caltech, Harvard, Idaho National Laboratory, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Scripps Research Institute, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania. Many of these experiences landed the sudents offers for graduate school, and several of these programs now contact us annual to ask about the next cohort of Millennium Scholars.
These students excelled academically while supporting each other (a key tenet of the program), and each student made major contributions to the success of the cohorts that came after them. They worked as official tutors and mentors for the younger Scholars, leading study sessions for members of the other cohorts. Even after they moved out of the Millennium Scholars residence hall for their senior year, they could be counted on to drop by during exam-week study halls to make themselves available, despite studying for their own exams. Their support of the program did not stop even after graduation. Sachira Denagamage1, Emily Cribas2, and Jason Turner3 all worked with us as program assistants during the 2017 Summer Bridge program, and their experience and assistance was critical to its success. In fact, their own stories provided powerful inspiration to the 37 new scholars in the program’s fifth cohort.
Every one of the first cohort’s seven graduates from the Eberly College of Science has moved on to post-graduate study. Kaleb Bogale and Liyana Ido decided not to go directly into a Ph.D. program. Instead, Bogale decided to spend a year further honing his research skills with a prestigious post-baccalaureate program at the National Institutes of Health, and Ido is pursuing an interest in health policy in the Master of Public Health program at Johns Hopkins. Victoria Spadafora wasn’t satisfied with a “simple” Ph.D. program and was accepted into the highly competitive M.D./ Ph.D. program at the Medical University of South Carolina. The other four graduates are all currently enrolled in top doctoral programs in their areas of interest: Taylor Soucy is at the University of Michigan, in the Materials Chemistry program; Sachira Denagamage is at Yale, studying biological and biomedical sciences; Rebecca Plessel is at New York University, in the Molecular Pharamacology program; and Emily Cribas is at the University of Pennsylvania, studying cell and molecular biology.
The Millennium Scholars program has grown significantly since we admitted our first cohort in 2013. We have expanded from a two-college program, between the Eberly College of Science and the College of Engineering, to include three other STEM colleges at Penn State: the Colleges of Agricultural Sciences, Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Information Sciences and Technology. The program is now organized under the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost, and with growing support from both the University and the Eberly College of Science as well as industry and alumni donors, we have been able to offer increasingly more support to our students each year. Our cohorts keep getting larger, and we expect to accept 40 new Scholars into our sixth cohort, in 2018. I am proud to say that the Penn State Millennium Scholars Program is here to stay, and the successes that resulted from the hard work of our first cohort have played a significant role in getting us to where we are today.
Chuck Fisher is the executive director of the Penn State Millennium Scholars program for highachieving STEM students committed to leadership and increasing the diversity of professionals in STEM-related disciplines. More information on the program is available at millennium.psu.edu.